TTW#36 - Lary Seven - Rotation
Cassette only - limited edition of 200 copies
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Track listing:
A: Live at White Columns, New York (2001)
B: Live at Experimental Intermedia, New York (2004)
Illustration - SavX.
Biography:
Lary 7 is a multimedia alchemist able to coax profane and inscrutable sounds and images from numerous and mysterious devices. His work has been described as that of a magician or scientist, not always certain of the outcome, but determined to see it through to its (Il)logical end. Since the late 1970’s he’s been building, soldering, photographing, recording, mixing, filming, playing, recombining, collecting, re-interpreting and creating in order to make something happen. He is the co-founder of Plastikville Records and Directart Productions Ltd. and is the founder of the Analogue Society. Mr. Seven lives and works in Manhattan’s East Village and is one of the last remaining vestiges of a once vibrant community.
Reviews
Aquarius Records (US):
Latest strange sonic missive from aQ beloved UK tape label The Tapeworm, this one from a multi media artist/musician/filmmaker/soundscaper named Lary Seven, who most of us here had never heard of, but who we discovered is a bit of a NYC fixture, a legendarily cantankerous maker of art, both audial and visual, there's very little in the way of details about the sounds here, other than they were recorded live in 2001 and 2004 in different spaces in New York. The first track is a gorgeous bit of looped minimal buzzing, darkly rhythmic, and strangely hypnotic, quiet enough that you can still hear the conversations in the room, which makes for a strange collage of random voices, textured electronic crunch and stuttering blurred glitch, impossible to determine the sound source, but it does seem to essentially be a collection of whirs and hums, clicks and chirps, very machinelike and robotic, like an ungrounded speaker or an instrument with the cable just barely plugged into the jack, creating a strange array of fluctuating statics, which are then sculpted into something that sounds a bit like a way more lo-fi home brewed Raster-Noton recording.
The second side / set again features the room sound, footsteps, voices, throat clearing, sneezes, various scrapes and shuffles, until finally, Seven introduces some electrical buzz, which then undulates, pulses and thrums, extremely minimal, lushly layered but in the context of a live performance in a big room, almost like a symphony of appliance hum, eventually, Seven does crank up the voltage, creating another framework of skeletal rhythmic skitter, the electronic fields swirling around a dark, throbbing industrial thud, like some sort of weirdo mad scientist primitive house music, being performed with an array of malfunctioning Tesla coils. Again, pretty dang cool, and another weird and wonderful set of sounds to add to the Tapeworm's twisted canon.
Vital Weekly (NL):
Lary Seven is around since the 70s in the art and music scene of New York, and has his own Plastikville Records label. On “Rotation” we find two concerts, one from 2001 and one from 2004, both captured with a microphone, so the audience is audible at times in the background. From what I hear this sounds like Seven is playing various turntables, loaded with a bunch of objects and the stylus is picking this up. Maybe there are additional sound effects. This is all quite conceptual music, I think, and no doubt would serve from a bit more editing, but especially the abrupt changes in this make up for it. Now if this was a bit shorter… Maybe its because we lack the visual element that makes this more difficult.
