Analog: Étoile Polaire / Dressed Like An Egg / Mad Rush

Description

Orange Mountain Music's new release 'Analog' contains three seminal works in Philip Glass's musical history. All are performed by the composer himself, overdubbing on various electric keyboards - Farfisa Combo Organ, Yamaha YC-45D organ, Hammond organ, Leslie rotary tone cabinets, Arp synthesizer and Fender Rhodes electric piano. The recordings date from the late 1970s and early 80s but all are new to CD - the last has never been released before - and have been specially re-mastered for this unusual album. At the time Glass and his recording producer Kurt Munkacsi pioneered recording techniques that tested the limits of the then current analog recording studio. In the late 1970s Philip Glass was asked by two film producers, François de Menil and Barbara Rose, to write music for a documentary film Mark di Suvero, Sculptor. It was Glass's first film score, predating even Koyaanisqatsi. The work's titles are named after di Suvero sculptures shown on screen, including Étoile Polaire (North Star), and it is performed by Glass, vocalists Joan La Barbara and Gene Rickard, and Dickie Landry on saxophones and flute. "Dressed like an Egg" is an early Glass score which was written as incidental music to a Mabou Mines Theater Company production about the life and art of Colette, premiered in Holland in 1977. Its musical material is based on Glass's Another Look at Harmony Part IV. The disc is rounded out with a never-before-heard recording of Glass's substantial work for organ, "Mad Rush". Originally used by choreographer Lucinda Childs for a dance of the same name, it had its first public performance on the occasion of the Dalai Lama's visit to New York in 1981. The piece has been in Glass's touring repertoire since it was composed and he says that "in many ways it prefigures recent developments in my music, which now often features solo lines, frequently lyrical in nature".