These Last Days

I first came across Richard Lainhart's music in 1986, while researching artist for a new CD label dedicated to electronic music. Among the many new creative figures emerging from this technological crucible, one type caught my interest in particular as a new spin on an already established idea — the electronic musician.

For many of these virtual composers, in the enviable possession of unheard new tone colors and music structures, the reference point remained deadeningly familiar — tonal in nature, grounded in traditional equal temperament, often slaved to robotic, dictatorial rhythms of the sequencer. Back then, few 'serious' composers stuck with electronics as a first language. Fewer still stayed true to their vision.

Richard's music rings true to the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music. It brings with it a sense of the past, present, and future that transcends time, technology, and cultural assumptions. It's a music that is beholden to no one, yet informed by a diverse sphere of appreciations, rich in both intellectual and emotional interest, at one distant and interior, actual, and implied.

...Richard's work often sees time and space as elastic, even transparent, the sonic equivalent of still water that runs unknowingly deep, and on closer view, reveals a microscopic world of prismatic, infinite movement.
— Ron Goldberg

NOTE: "These Last Days" was released in 1987 on the CD-only Periodic Music label, founded by Ron Goldberg. The original album cover is shown here. Each piece is a solo keyboard performance with synced digital delays, recorded in realtime to a digital recorder. Richard plays vibes on "The Hidden Rose;" on all the other tracks, he plays Korg and Yamaha synths. James McLean was the recording engineer; Dan McKenney took the cover photograph.

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