us Richard Lainhart: Pre-Eno Ambient piece rediscovered after 30 years

Pioneering Synthesizer poet Richard Lainhart has made one of his early pieces, “White Night”, available on CD on the Ex Ovo label – after it spent over thirty years in his archives. The track, a just under thirty minute long drone composition, realised in the late fall of 1974 at the State University of New York, has a tender taste of early Ambient to it, even though it was composed well before Brian Eno first began his own experiments in the field of discreet music. After it was finished, “White Night” strangely enough never made it to LP or CD and wasn’t even featured on the Lainhart-retrospective “Ten Thousand Shades Of Blue”, which received a lot of media attention, including an enthusiastic BBC feature. Almost completely by chance, the piece was rediscovered in the year 2005, when Richard Lainhart made his entire backcatalogue available on the web and already featured on Ex Ovo’s “I, Mute Hummings” sampler, in a remixed version of nine minutes. Only now, however, after three decades in the vault, “White Night” is finally available worldwide again in its full-length version.

Essentially, “White Night” is an outwardly simple and fluent piece with a degree of inner complexity which prevents it from slipping to the background: “The piece consists of a dense, continuous four-note chord, each note in the chord recorded in a separate pass to one track on a Scully 4-track studio recorder”, Richard Lainhart explains, “Each track consists of a single sine wave oscillator which is frequency modulated by a group of eight additional sine wave oscillators. Those oscillators are all tuned to different tones, each harmonically related to the fundamental chord tone.”

Therefore, the musical action does not necessarily take place in the center, but in the harmonics: Richard Lainhart: “The result is a continuously-changing complex harmonic waveform (...), generating a continuously-changing complex timbre based on the fundamental pitch of the note.”

“White Night” by Richard Lainhart is available directly from the Ex Ovo site and will set you back 10€ (about $14,50).

Homepage: Richard Lainhart
Homepage: Ex Ovo Records
By Tobias Fischer, published 2008-02-11

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