Album Notes

Laurie Anderson:
"The art of audio collage has been reinvented here...I'm reminded of Brian Eno's music for imaginary films, although Charles takes this idea much farther."

Stereo Review:
"Charles Amirkhanian is a highly imaginative sound poet, text-sound creator, and contrapuntal collagist of the first order."


"Descriptive, specific, lush, and oddly exotic" is how Laurie Anderson describes the music on this CD. "Expert at the sort of thing his imitators do not do half so well as he" (The New York Times), Charles Amirkhanian is a leading practitioner of electroacoustic music and text-sound composition.

The CD presents the premiere recording of one of Amirkhanian's most well-known and warmly received works, Walking Tune A Room-Music for Percy Grainger. Anderson writes:

"Mixing the real and the imaginary is a skill that very few composers have. Charles jumps back and forth between these worlds with delightful ease, his curiosity and humor always evident. But in Walking Tune and many of the other pieces he's done over his long career this skill is mixed with a sensibility that is elegiac."

Other premiere recordings include the invigorating Chu Lu Lu, a dense one-minute "commercial" commissioned by the American Center in Paris, and the playful Gold and Spirit, commissioned by the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The latter piece realizes a cherished Amirkhanian ambition: to create cheers based on artists' names. Hence we hear such group cheers as "Go Van Gogh," "Ray Man Ray," and "Marcel - Duh Champ."

The CD also contains the slyly witty Vers Les Anges, a tribute to Nicolas Slonimsky, and the hauntingly somber Bajanoom (1990), titled from the Armenian word for "separation."