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i saw in the water the clouds and the stars
in the clouds the tiger's stripes
in the tiger's stripes a face the clouds and the stars
in the clouds the fish
in the fish cave drawings
in the cave drawings hieroglyphics
through lines - i sense
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Sun Rushing In - Sound Collage
for Live Performance
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Lauri des Marais - Another Way to Hear Circles
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Lauri des Marais - Stimuli:
Stories in Sound Vol.1
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Lauri des Marais - Towards Harmony
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Lauri des Marais - Cosmic Alien Dancers
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The compositions of Lauri des Marais are primarily synthesized streams between shape, mood, and pattern-texture construction; this she refers to as Classical Technology, which creates Stories in Sound.
While just out of school and working at Lotus Development, I was living on Pearl Street in Cambridge, MA in a multi-colored historic 4 story apartment building that just happened to have a piano. Tinkering a roommate (he plays Chopin) came home and enthusiastically asked me what I was playing. "It's something I just came up with." Pearl Street always reminds me of Sesame Street, who'd have guessed that only a few years later I'd be on an album with Ken Field who does the jazzy music for his wife Karen Aqua's animations on Sesame Street!" ...my sensitivity to sound emerged from having a father who was blind and thinking of how it is like to hear the world without sight.
Lauri des Marais is self-taught and now has a large body of works that includes solo piano, electronic ambience, musique concrête sound design, and avante-guarde works she calls Philosophy of Perception. In her personal practice of deep listening, she developed a form of movement she calls Movement So Still With Sound, where themes of traditional eastern Butoh-like movement translate the subtler dimensional qualities of her music.
des Marais' repertoire includes Towards Harmony: Mapping Peace through Sound, a piece performed with Kris Thompson and Christopher Maples at the Gloucester New Arts Festival in 2006. After a period of silence, No Words Pressure Release, a 15 minute musique concrête sound design using sound clips generously given from AguaSonic Acoustics and a few of my own found sounds (secret - movie clips), was created for a performance with Pauline Oliveros at the Women & Identity Festival, Deep Listening Institute. When deciding on a title, Pauline suggested "No Words", to which I added "Pressure Release". For this performance Pauline graced us with her Apple Box, which she said was the first piece of equipment she made for live performance in the 1960s, and which she hadn’t used for years. The Apple Box uses a wooden apple crate to resonate the various everyday found materials she has (glued) on top of the box, materials like cut metal and a styrofoam cup sound like whale calls. (... though (if i remember correctly ...she told me they didn't have styrofoam cups back then...)
des Marais practices Deep Listening and has performed several times with Pauline Oliveros, once at ICA Plan B Evolving Arts, Santa Fe, NM - In Celebration of Deep Listening. Her works have been showcased at theremin music festivals in Australia, and her first album Stimuli Stories in Sound – Vol. 1 has been heard around the globe. Lauri waits patiently for Philosophy of Perception a piece with samples of Alan Watts' lectures to be heard in one of Edwin Lynch's films. Philosophy of Perception was made with special thanks to Matt Branco, Berman/Branco Music Boston, MA at a time when I was still only using the piano and didn't have the means of sampling the Electronic University's cassette tapes into my piano pieces.
13 Transitions was showcased in 1999 at the premier Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, hosted by the Henry Miller Library, and with special thanks to Ken Field who gave me his performance time as he couldn't make it to the festival. 13 Transitions was the first sound collage for live performance Lauri did in collaboration with Susan DeLeo, and although never released in full, some of the transitions are available on her first album Stimuli - Stories in Sound Vol. 1. Lauri has done music for dance for young choreographers Sarah Slifer and Holly Seitz-Marchant. Other artists she has worked with include Mission of Burma and Alloy Orchestra's Roger Miller, who threw the pool balls in Stimuli and eloquently adds a minimal touch to Silence on her first album Stimuli - Stories in Sound Vol. 1. (Roger also did the Pokeman Theme song.)
Stimuli: Stories in Sound Volume 1 is a collaboration with Erik Lindgren and includes Ken Field, a libretto by Simon & Schuster author Pagan Kennedy, and Roger Miller.
Awards
Samples of Lauri des Marais' work can be found at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music library, with special thanks to Pauline Oliveros.
(2006) On a panel of 3 to choose the American Composer's Forum Jerome Composers Commissioning Program honorees. Special thanks to ACF for giving me this opportunity to be part of a panel of such magnitude. I am happy to have heard such wonderful music and to have the opportunity to open the boundaries of the way traditional music is heard - grants were given to non-traditional composers, such as Corey Dargel and Kristin Norderval, to name a few.
Projects include:
AguaSonic Acoustics affiliation
This is some of the work i did with Mark Fischer; who developed a way to view sound in digital form using wavelets; a project he developed to view whale and dolphin songs. Wavelets in another form is a program currently used by the U.S. Government to compress digital information (e.g., fingerprint libraries). However, the way Mark has manipulated it expands the information and now these wavelets allow you to view very detailed information of wide ranges of sound (frequencies in the range of cetaceans... Frequency Range [kHz], 0.00002† to 110 (+3/-20dB)....
This is a little history of the development of 'Four Mountains' ....
Four Mountains premiered at Liquid Sound, Germany in 2006. One Mountain was found when Mark Fischer (AguaSonic.com) realized a pyramid shaped image in the nano second before he could hear this particular recording of a blue whale he had begun to work with. Adding to the oddity is when you view a typical whale or dolphin song, the images look nothing like this, and so this was a spectacular finding for him. Mark invited Lauri to compose a soundscape for this previously silent Mountain. Now the frequencies of this 4 part soundscape manifest as the colors in this visual representation of Four Mountains. (For those curious, I asked Mark if the angles of this Mountain are similar to those of the ancient Egyptian pyramids … ?still to be determined.)
Mark just sent me this interesting link ..."In Navajo Creation Mythology, they have a story of the Four Sacred Mountains..."
While viewing this Four Mountains DVD pay special attention to the color variations that follow the sound. The color is directly related to the frequency of sound using conventional mapping. The music is comprised of two pieces 'Paint' and 'Day 5: Wind' (Day 5 is taken from a series composed by Lauri des Marais).
Beetle Forest 1997, musique concrete sound design: crickets and synthesizer
(excerpt of a 23 minute piece)
Coming of Spring 1999, synthesizer (excerpt of a 23 minute piece)
AguaSonic sounds in wavelet space present subtle changes in color at times.
... and i awoke as a child, slightly numb and full of water
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Sun Rushing In - Sound Collage
for Live Performance CD-R $10
2006
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Lauri des Marais - Another Way to Hear Circles CD-R $8
1998
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Lauri des Marais - Stimuli: Stories in Sound Vol.1 CD $10
2000
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Lauri des Marais - Towards Harmony CD-R $8
1998
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Lauri des Marais - Cosmic Alien Dancers CD-R $10
2007
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$2 will be added to each disc for shipping and handling.
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All formats of my music and official website will soon be available on
Postdawn Nurseries.
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Online Now!
