About This Item
Recorded in Lary 7's legendary apartment studio Plastikville over nearly a decade, Larynx is the first full-length retrospective of the East Village icon's hybrid music and engineering practice. The record mobilizes 7's array of homemade instruments, which he 'frankensteins' together from offcast and outmoded bits of technology. An ode to the long-lost Canal Street junk shops he frequented in the 1970s and '80s, Larynx brings together numerous thrift finds and sonic inventions used in his theatrical performances and installations. To play Inchle concretotron,Inch a board covered with twenty years worth of unspooled magnetic tape, 7 runs a tape head topographically over the flattened strips, picking up snippets of their recorded contents. The spring tree, another of his contraptions, is simply turned on and left to it's own devices; feedback loops cause the amplified coils to resound in space and slowly increase in volume. The track InchMechano-BleepInch features a pattern generator constructed from a telephone sequence switch, 150 oscillators from an electric accordion, a sewing machine motor, and an early computing system called a Inchselect-a-board.Inch Meanwhile, antiquated electronic instruments abound-7 employs the Ondioline, a precursor to the synthesizer; a Philicorda organ; and a homemade Trautonium, among other gadgets. Following Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Raymond Scott of Manhattan Research, 7 adopts a painstaking editing process that is entirely analogue. With lacquer cut directly from reel-to-reel and mastered by Paul Gold, Larynx is, in 7's words, Inchthe sound of the twentieth century going haywire.Inch Multimedia art alchemist LARY 7 was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1956, and encouraged by his mother to mine junkyards for treasure from a young age. A former media studies student of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampto