Product Description

Meditative yet propulsive. Structured yet sprawling. Gossamer yet muscular. Inspired yet meticulously constructed. METHOD MUSIC by Lawrence Ball is all of these and more, a double album of highly adventurous electronic music by a master innovator of algorithmic composition. But this album possesses a unique and illustrious lineage that, despite the clear difference in style and genre, connects it to one of the most famous works in the rock music repertoire - the ideas behind METHOD MUSIC are both the outgrowth and the foundation of the legendary LIFEHOUSE project by Pete Townshend, the conceptualizer and co-producer of the album, and presents a theoretical system of musical portraiture in which a listener's personal data is translated into a unique composition.

Lawrence Ball is a composer with over 170 scored compositions and 3,000 recorded piano improvisations. Lawrence has composed in a wide range of idioms and genres, including Turkish saz music, music for Sufi meditation groups, piano improvisations, symphonies, multimedia installations, and auto-generated music and soundscapes. He has performed in the U.S., Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the UK. (see lawrenceball.org)

In 1993, he began collaborating with quantum physicist Michael Tusch and programmer Dave Snowdon. Dave Snowdon and Lawrence created a software program called 'Visual Harmony', which uses Lawrence's 'Harmonic Maths' to create visual images.

Lawrence and Dave went on to collaborate with Pete Townshend on the Lifehouse Method web site, based on Townshend's Lifehouse concept. Users were invited to 'sit' and enter information about themselves, which would be analyzed by the software and transformed into a unique piece of music. The website launched in 2007 and resulted in over ten thousand portraits before going into temporary stasis in 2008.

The result of Lawrence's research work into the Lifehouse Method was the creation of this collection, combining Townshend's concept with his own Harmonic Maths language. Here, the 'sitters' are imagined by Lawrence and are used as a means to further explore computer-based composition techniques. CD 2, 'Imaginary Galaxies' is an extension and expansion of the sitter structure into a more meditative orchestral experience. For more details see Lawrence's Meditational Music blog (meditationalmusic.net/blog).

Other collaborators include healer/counselor Isobel McGilvray, choreographers Sheila Styles and Rebecca Ham, pianists Yonty Solomon, Mark Swartzentruber, Alessandra Celletti, and string chamber group The Smith Quartet. He has also accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena with extended keyboard improvisations. In 1996, Lawrence Ball founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which features contemporary music along with other artistic media.

'In my musical creation I am reinforcing directness, expressing something simple yet affecting, and using the mind as an instrument,' writes Lawrence. 'Music for me is an ocean of exploration, the communication of internal realities through airwaves.' Lawrence is also a mathematician, and has worked as a private mathematics tutor for 37 years. He lives in North London.

Review

The sexy lede buried beneath the almost comically dry title of this record is twofold. 1) It is a collaboration between the mathematician/composer Lawrence Ball and Pete Townshend, and 2) It represents the at-least-partial realization of one Townshend's most dearly held fantasies, a rock opera called Lifehouse that was to use synthesizers as a way to to produce music tailor-made to a specific user's input. The Lifehouseproject is one of those Smile-like ideas that tend to strand grand-thinking rock musicians on sharp rocks, but the idea involved creating musical software that would be free to users, who would feed the software specific input and watch as it produced a brand-new piece of music specifically for them. Because it's always better to take a person for a ride in a sports car than to spend hours detailing the features of its engine, Ball and Townshend show you exactly how the process feels: the lead-off cut on this monumental two-disc set is 'Baba O'Riley', fed through Ball's software. What emerges on the other end is wondrous, rippling, and startlingly tactile music. There is no math in the listening: It's like watching a brightly colored pinwheel turn faster and faster until it appears suddenly to revert in the other direction. --Pitchfork, By Jayson Greene , February 28, 2012

Forty years on, Pete Townshend finally produces the 'Lifehouse' album for someone else! 'Another chapter,' he says...
In the unfolding of 'Lifehouse' there is no 'now', says Pete Townshend. 'We wait patiently for the singularity to catch up with us.' Forty years ago, Townshend imagined compiling a personal profile for every member of The Who's audience, feeding each one into a computer to create a 'celestial cacophony'. This vision led to 'Lifehouse', his legendary unrealized rock-opera with a formidable afterlife. When composer Lawrence Ball later began formulating a musical system called Harmonic Maths, Townshend recognized a kindred spirit. 'I heard some of Lawrence's compositions when we communicated about Terry Riley, and I realized then that he and I had some harmonic and modal stuff in common,' he says. 'I spoke to him and it became immediately clear he was my man.' In 2007 the pair launched The Lifehouse Method, a website inspired by Townshend's original concept, capable of producing millions of unique pieces by converting personal data into musical decisions. 'People could enter a photograph, two sounds and a rhythm to create a musical portrait of themselves,' says Ball. Over 10,000 people participated. Many were baffled. 'They emailed saying, 'This is a waste of my f*cking time, Pete!' It doesn't really address the Who audience. It's a complex art project.' To determine how The Lifehouse Method would function, Ball produced preliminary 'testbed pieces'. These have been collected on Method Music, a Townshend-produced album of multi-layered electronic instrumentals. It nods to 'Lifehouse's origins on 'Meher Baba Piece', a tribute to 'Baba O Riley' which Townshend later recycled for 'Fragments' on Endless Wire. 'It all goes around and around,' says Ball. 'Pete loves all that! He was enormously enthusiastic, although quite insistent and very tenacious, which could be a little uncomfortable.' Ball imagines The Lifehouse Method being installed in the National Portrait Gallery, allowing visitors to enter a booth to create an almost instant musical portrait. Townshend mentions setting up access codes to a 'compositional website', and an ambitious live event. At this stage, letting people hear their completed Method pieces recorded carefully will possible convince them to visit us again for the next chapter,' he says. 'And Lifehouse will have another chapter.' --Uncut, April 2012