Ten Thousand Shades of Blue

I first met Richard Lainhart during the 1970s, when electronic music was still a new medium and when everyone was thinking about what its potential was. In those days, we were all asking ourselves, what were the special musical things you could do with electronics? Richard's answer through the years has encompassed both sound and process.

Lainhart's idea has been and still is to make very special, unique sounds that derive in one way or another from the structures and textures of natural processes. He has invented a new kind of constructivism based on sounds that are only about themselves and their transformations. There are no meditative states in his thinking, nothing that relates to human states of being. In fact, although he thinks about natural models, the models don't generate his music – they simply illustrate what he has in mind.

"The sounds that I try to create in those pieces is a sound in which there is a great deal of detail but relatively little surface change. The analogy I think of is that these sounds are kinds of abstractions of natural processes like flowing water or wind in the trees which is ongoing but varies in the detail ... "

So to Lainhart, a sound is an entity with internal shadings and lighting, and our attention should focus on that entity and its nuance.

In short, Lainhart's methods of working are performance oriented and often improvisational, but it is the sound that is the real point of his music. As he said, "I'm not trying to imitate anything. My main concern in these pieces is to present sounds that have never been heard. I'm interested in making sounds that are intrinsically interesting. And beautiful on their own."
— Joel Chadabe, (1939-2021)
Composer, author, teacher, president of Electronic Music Foundation

Discography:  These Last Days │ Ten Thousand Shades of Blue │ I, Mute Hummings (compilation) │ White Night │ Lux │ Luminous Accidents │ Cranes Fly West │ The Wave Sounding Sea/The Course of the River │ Polychromatic Integers │ An Abandoned Garden │ NEW! – Modulisme Session 101