Catherine Christer Hennix The Electric Harpsichord 2010 Die Schachtel Oct/2010 Deluxe edition, silver and gloss varnish print, innovative silver/black cardboard book+CD edition, 60 pp in English. Limited to 500 copies Known to the very few, The Electric Harpsichord is possibly THE obscure masterpiece of the days of the early American minimalism. Recorded live in 1976 after many years of study under the guidance of Pandit Pran Nath and LaMonte Young, it has finally found the perfect home in the DieSchachtel ART catalogue: a lavishly produced and innovative silver/black cardboard book+CD edition, that gives the work the space and merit it deserves as a unique work of art, complete with two poems by LaMonte Young especially written for this edition, and an extensive essay by Henry Flynt. An improvisation performed on Just Intonation tuned keyboards put through time lag accumulators similar to those used by Terry Riley, Hennix has produced one of the most remarkable pieces of music to emerge from the La Monte Young school of minimalism. A Swedish born composer, who studied in the tradition of the Xenakis and Stockhausen in the 1960s, Hennix met La Monte Young and Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath at the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, and pursued studies with both men during the 1970s. While the use of the time lag in Riley's works such as "A Rainbow in Curved Air" results in an experience of blissful, focused, samadhi-like calm, Hennix's drone work has more in common with the chaotic fluxes of psychedelic experience or the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism. This is a moving eternity, pulsating, shifting-something like a raga perhaps, insofar as a raga is a specific deity invoked into sound, shifting, fluttering inside the matrix of the drone. (Marcus Boom) "In every media, the work of Christer Hennix shows extraordinary mastery of the interrelationship between Eastern and Western thought" La Monte Young "Hennixs The Electric Harpsichord is a gigantic piece, ma killer, a work which exists outside of style or genre. It is unbelievable. It creates blocks of sound that move min and out of each other to create the effects. It is a pure perfect piece of music that resonates and resounds and creates a universe that it is impossible by other means. In our primitive and unenlightened culture it becomes a work of transcendent power." Glenn Branca (http://www.dieschachtel.com/editions/dsA10.htm) Hyperbole and silence wrap around Catherine Christer Hennixs music like the black and white of yin and yang. La Monte Young and Henry Flynt have praised her merger of music and mathematics for decades (well, initially his merger Christer Hennix was born in 1948 and took the name Catherine when she adopted the female gender in 1990). Hennix hasnt exactly promoted herself; while shes lived and occasionally performed in Europe since the early 90s, until now she hadnt made any records. Until the release of this volume, the only way to hear Hennix was in person, on certain Henry Flynt records (CTune, Purified By Fire, and Dharma Warriors) and via Ubuweb. This release is an excerpt from a 1976 concert and is issued now in tribute to her late guru Pandit Pran Nath, the Kirana gharana singer who also taught Young, Terry Riley and Jon Hassell and died in 1996. Its swanky packaging signifies significance; the CD comes wrapped inside a 60-page booklet with two poems by Young, a lengthy historical-philosophical discussion of the work by Flynt, and an even longer (and decidedly over-my-head) mathematical discussion of the piece by Hennix. But the most meaningful part of the project is Hennixs rather extraordinary music. Hennix had been involved with music since her youth, when she got lessons from the American jazz musicians who stayed in her parents Stockholm home, and shed begun working with primitive computer systems before she began associating with Young. After encountering Nath, she synthesized her analysis of tambura drones with the electronic sine tones that Young played in his house all day, every day. The outcome was a music mathematically calculated to induce altered states. The instrumental set-up on The Electric Harpsichord resembles Terry Rileys time-lag accumulator she plays an electric keyboard, in this case a Yamaha tuned in Just Intonation and fed into a tape delay system but the results are quite different. Where Riley generated overlapping streams of notes, Hennixs music rises and falls like ocean waves, with bright harmonics glinting atop a continuous sound like whitecaps. The harpsichords spindly key strokes accumulate into an undulating sonic mass that is neither harsh in the fashion of contemporary noisemakers nor bland. Instead, its rich in tones and overtones that seem to multiply in fractal cells that maintain their integrity as they increase in density. Put the CD on and putter about and it just sounds nice; give it your undivided attention and it sucks you right in and whips the alpha waves to the top of your brain pan like foam to the top of a cappuccino. The effect is a slowing of experienced time, which may be a partial explanation for why it took Hennix so long to get this record out. But to stretch time is to stretch life, and what greater gift could you get from a five-inch shiny disc? (http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/6008) 01-The Electric Harpsichord [25:25]