mary jane leach: pipe dreams

Milan based imprint Blume offer two incredible archival works from the 1980s American composer Mary Jane Leach, never before released. Mary Jane Leach is a definitive model of the American avant-garde and experimental composer -- creatively brilliant, tragically underrecognized, yet always there, rigorously plumbing the depths, issuing challenges, venturing toward the unknown. Leach's creative practice began at the crossroads of the modern and post-modern -- with the death of the American dream, its hegemonic point of view, and with the irreconcilable reductive legacies of their predecessors, the minimalists. Leach pursued the physicality of sound and acoustic phenomena -- investigating their properties, and interactions with space. Despite being incredibly active, during the 1970s and '80s Leach failed to offer a single commercial release. She instead instigated a singular body of work which is conceptually centered around live acoustic phenomena and performance. In effect, there are two dynamic components of her work -- the notes, structures, and relationships which make up a composition, and a secondary series of difference, combination, and interference tones, generated by a work's relationship to the space in which it is conceived and performed. Pipe Dreams represents a turning of the tide -- a means through which to offer the composer the attention she has always righty deserved. Comprised of two incredible works -- "4BC" and "Pipe Dreams" -- this LP is a brilliant entry point into Mary Jane Leach's sprawling body of composition and investigatory work. Like all of her efforts, they are temporal snapshots, incapable of being fully reproduced. They are singular and unique. "4BC" is a work for four bass clarinets, recorded during 1984. It is part of Leach's large body of compositions which employs long tones (drone) within a constrained tonal palette. "Pipe Dreams", written for, and recorded on, the organ in St. Peter's in Köln, Germany, during 1989, was realized by, and as a direct response to, the unique environment for which it was made. St. Peter's organ has two sets of pipes at opposite ends of the church, each having separate sounds and stops that can generate microtonal intervals. The work is a structured improvisation, exploring antiphony and the specific sounds of that organ, extra-musical as well as musical. These pieces help illuminate Leach as one of the most important voices in her generation.