For LMY and MZ (Live) by Dave Seidel

This is a recording of a live performance at Future Collective (Brattleboro, VT), Thursday May 22, 2014. It is mono, recorded direct from the line output of my little Orange Pix Crush 35LDX combo amp to a Zoom H4N recorder. The only editing was a tiny fade-out at the very tail end to remove some unwanted noise that crept in.

I don't claim this piece as a composition of my own, but rather a meditation on La Monte Young's Opening, Magic, and Magic Opening chords. The Opening Chord is played on the combination of a Drone Lab and a NovaDrone, and is processed through a Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai and a Boomerang III looper. The Magic Chord was produced by the LAS-9 app running on my Google Nexus 7 tablet, looping WAV files I made in Csound, with no further processing.

You can hear the Opening Chord build up starting at the beginning of the piece and fully in place by about 1:20. I start "riffing" on it using the DMM at about 2:15. At about 7:03 I start adding in the tones of the Magic Chord, which is complete by about 8:30. After, that I slowly subtract notes from both chords until only the fundamental just fifth remains.

I did my best to make the tuning as precise as possible, but both the Drone Lab and NoveDrone are subject to a certain amount of drift over time.

The image is the unaltered spectral display of the piece in Audacity. It's interesting to me that there's a lot of magenta in it, especially given Marian Zazeela's pervasive use of that color in her beautiful visual works that usually accompany Young's music.