Lary 7 Larynx

Recorded in Lary 7's legendary apartment studio Plastikville over nearly a decade, Larynx is the firstfull-length retrospective of the East Village icon's hybrid music and engineering practice. The recordmobilizes 7's array of homemade instruments, which he `frankensteins' together from offcast andoutmoded bits of technology. An ode to the long-lost Canal Street junk shops he frequented in the1970s and '80s, Larynx brings together numerous thrift finds and sonic inventions used in histheatrical performances and installations.To play "le concretotron," a board covered with twenty years worth of unspooled magnetic tape, 7runs a tape head topographically over the flattened strips, picking up snippets of their recordedcontents. The spring tree, another of his contraptions, is simply turned on and left to its owndevices; feedback loops cause the amplified coils to resound in space and slowly increase in volume.The track "Mechano-Bleep" features a pattern generator constructed from a telephone sequenceswitch, 150 oscillators from an electric accordion, a sewing machine motor, and an early computingsystem called a "select-a-board." Meanwhile, antiquated electronic instruments abound_7 employsthe 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 ManhattanResearch, 7 adopts a painstaking editing process that is entirely analogue. With lacquer cut directlyfrom reel-to-reel and mastered by Paul Gold, Larynx is, in 7's words, "the sound of the twentiethcentury going haywire."Multimedia art alchemist LARY 7 was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1956, and encouraged by hismother to mine junkyards for treasure from a young age. A former media studies student of TonyConrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton at the city's public university, 7 was also educated inengineering, architecture, and filmmaking. He moved to Manhattan permanently in the late 1...