LOVELY MUSIC – LCD 4011
(06/30/25)
All music by Laetitia Sonami – All words by Melody Sumner Carnahan
Read essay by Jon Leidecker, and Review
Disk 1
01 SOMBRE DIMANCHE (aka Drole de Dimanche) (1985) [4:43]
George Brooks, saxophone
Homemade electronics, Yamaha Portasound, Di Giugno’s 4X, Voice
This recording is made with a hybrid of very high and very low gear. Once completed, I asked George Brooks to add a saxophone track which we recorded in San Francisco . This early piece was not performed live.
Side Note: An anonymous friend would let me in the IRCAM studios at night, when no one was there, so I could play with Giuseppe Di Giugno’s 4X. I made tapes, and later used some of the recordings. I seem to recall that some of the processed voices come from there.
02 WHY_DREAMS LIKE A LOOSE ENGINE (2000) [11:00]
Saxophone John Ingle
Voice, lady’s glove, Yamaha TG77, EPS sampler, Max software, Servo motors
Live performance recorded at Mills College by Maggi Payne
Mastered at Harvestworks
Sumner Carnahan’s text (excerpt from “Sign” ) describes a train ride through what I imagine to be a vast Western landscape. Composed of layers of activity and layers of stillness, the music conjures the character’s emotions as her gaze wanders, oscillating between the outside world and her inner world where memories or desires obscure her observations. The lady’s glove controls the rhythm of several small servo motors. Their sounds and rhythms are processed live along with the music.
Premiered at Gaudeamus Music Week- Melkweg, Netherlands
03 MONA LISA (1997) [9:00]
Voice, lady’s glove, Yamaha TG77, EPS Sampler, Max software
Rhythm algorithms by David Wessel
Mona Lisa is an attempt at a more improvised form of music. The sensors on the lady’s glove and the shoe control various sets of rhythmic patterns which are associated with groups of sounds. These rhythmic patterns are highly unstable and on the verge of collapse, until they finally disintegrate only to resurface later as a vague memory, somewhat like the voice in “What Happened”
A different version of Mona Lisa was published as Story Road (Tellus26, 1992), and Has/had (Ars Electronica)
Premiered at The Kitchen, NYC.
04 CONVERSATION WITH A LIGHTBULB (2000) [10:19]
lady’s glove, Max software
While my gestures here do not control the music, which is composed of sonified data, they control the luminosity of flocks of incandescent lightbulbs strewn on the stage, in various rhythms, like fireflies.
Premiered at the Santa Fe International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music.
Side Note: The music was inspired by my collaboration with Jocelyn Robert: Les Scaphandres
05-08 MANANANGGAL – WOMEN SOIGNÉES (1993)
Created in collaboration with Marie Goyette and Melody Sumner Carnahan
Voice, lady’s glove, Yamaha TG77, Max software, EPS Sampler
Second Female voice, Marie Goyette
Male voice, David Fisher
05 Manananggal – My mouth embodies luxury [4:52]
06 Manananggal – There is no guarantee that goodness is possible [8:20]
07 Manananggal – Speak slowly, Dance with me [5:00]
08 Manananggal – All that follows is true, I swear [4:04]
Originally commissioned by STEIM Institute, Amsterdam, the work was later adapted for radio for the New American Radio series, 1994.
A musical drama production about two diversely powerful women who come under each other’s influence, thereby releasing unconscious contents. “The manananggal” (a type of vampire known in the Philippine folklore) is a woman who can cut her body in half. The top half flies around at night attacking other women, looking for babies to devour, then rejoins the bottom half at daylight to resume a normal life.
Side note: Marie Goyette had worked on sensored shoes and a sensored belt while in residency at Steim and I had the lady’s glove – We were a complete human.
Performed Merkin Hall NYC, 1993
Disk 2
01 WILFRED WANTS YOU TO REMEMBER US (aka The Bench) (1995) [17:40]
Voice, lady’s glove, MAX software, Yamaha TG 77, EPS Sampler
John Ingle, Saxophone
Jerry Hunt, Electric Piano sequence “Blues in Hell” , recorded at Steim in 1990
Chinzalée Sonami, child voice
Commissioned for New American Radio series ’95 under the title THE BENCH
Based on the story “ Two” by Sumner Carnahan, Wilfred takes place in a crowded city square in Spain. It depicts the relationship between to street people, a man and a woman, as recounted by an objective observer, the narrator, a woman, who views the action from her hotel balcony, opening onto a courtyard in which the “lovers” enact their drama.
“Wilfred is a kind of melodrama in the 19th century sense. Ms. Sonami narrates a street scene to sound accompaniments…either snippets of street life overheard or synthesized roars. Certain elements recur: A single percussive explosion, a two-note bass phrase, rising diminished seventh chords, rattling pianolike arpeggios. In the center. the colliding programs compose an extended “keyboard melody” … [Ms. Sonami] responds to the threat of chaos by telling a story in its midst. She acknowledges the incoherence but manages to draw a little order from it. Perhaps humanism is not dead…. She has acknowledged the endlessly virtuosic powers of her instruments but at the same time she argues with them, saying perhaps that beginnings, ends, limits and symmetries are still important to some of us” – Bernard Holland, The New York Times, Dec 12, 1990
“Sonami dug up [a] serialist/academic conceit and replanted it in the more fertile ground of computer sampling and Ashley-inspired opera (what critic Arthur Sabatini is calling the performance novel). …. …Wilfred, with its dramatic use of space and texture, seemed like a breakthrough in the career of one of California’s most personal voices” –Kyle Gann, The Village Voice, December 25, 1990
Side Note: Jerry Hunt was in residency at Steim at the same time as I was (1993?) and his studio was next to mine so we could hear each other thru the walls. He told me he used to make some money playing piano in dives, so he recorded this piano tune for Wilfred- I stored the sequene in Max and would control the TG77 and take apart the sound in syshex messages during the performance, as the tune progressed.
As for the child’s voice, my daughter’s room was above my studio in the basement. She could hear me rehearsing all nights through the heating vent. One night not being able to take it anymore she started yelling “Arrete la Musique”, which fitted perfectly with what i was working on (!) – I asked her to repeat it many times so I could sample her and then reverse it (one of the many reasons this CD is dedicated to her).
Premiered at Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NYC)
02 WHAT HAPPENED II (1993) [11:53]
Voice, lady’s glove, Mac Powerbook 180 with MAX software, Yamaha TG77, Peavey SP Sampler, IVL Pitch-midi
The original version of What Happened was created for a compilation curated by Melody who asked several composers from the Mills College Music Community where she was studying, to create music based on her texts to be broadcast on the radio.
Originally performed with my home made PAIA synthesizer, cassette tapes and Prophet 5 (“What Happened”), I made several versions which adapted to the technology I was developing. This version is performed with the lady’s glove, the hand stealing my voice.
Sumner Carnahan’s text seems to naturally lend itself to the possibilities for disintegration via gestures—a shift in the means of communications, from the talking person to the mute, from the highly selective rendering of one’s personal life to the unspoken, complex and undefined suggestions. It is as if a camera is pointing at the narrator and as it changes focus, the portrait gets blurred and brings forth new images. It is not that the story has stopped, but it is not heard any more. Now, as the focus keeps changing, the individual characteristics of the person smooth out – they become broader and encompass cultural characteristics which themselves disappear to the point where the experience may be common to all before re-emerging in the individual character.
As I performed it thru the years, it was interesting to see how the audience’s relationship to “reality stories” changed.
Performed 1993-1994, Obscure. Quebec, Festival International de Musique Electroacoustique/Bourges
What Happened was released on “Imaginary Landscapes “ (Elektra, 1989) and The Time is Now (Frog Peak Music, 1983)
Side Note: A subsequent version, “What Happened III”, was created with the lady’s glove controlling the voice and music in real time as well as the video which ran “Imagine”, the live video software developed by Steina Vasulka and Tom Demeyer at Steim Institute, 1996.
03 A HISTORICAL MOMENT ON A LINE BETWEEN A and B (2005) [15:00]
Lady’s glove, Max-MSP
Expanding on the continued exploration of collapsing perspectives and intrinsic impermanence of sound, this latest piece in this collection does not have a story. By then I decided to perform without the voice, and invest the story in the music.
Premiered in Shangai eArts, NY Electronic Arts Festival, Princeton, Quebec Mois-Multi
Side note: Dedicated to Michel Waisviz- as he approached the moment of his death, Michel said “this is a historical moment”
04 SHE CAME BACK, AGAIN (1997) [15:45]
Voice, lady’s glove, Yamaha TG77, Max software
Sumner Carnahan’s text excerpted from “One More Thing”
Male voice, David Wessel
The original idea was to re-discover the pleasure of the fluidity of sounds offered by FM synthesis (as opposed to the more rigid world of samplers). The lady’s glove can control parameters of the synthesis and flirt with the destabilization of these sounds, constructing and de-constructing layers, forming recollections of abstract habitual patterns. The mind is let to wander in the undefined territory where organisms and mechanisms mimic each other. The inspiration for the text came from an earlier composition “she keeps coming back for more” (1995) which had no narrative. It gives some obscure and confusing descriptions of a mechanical being, me on stage, the same way a narrator’s voice in some animal or war documentary describes the scene being shown, trying to create meaning when meaning is not needed.
Side note: This is the only piece where my voice is pre-recorded. I am the mechanism on stage creating the sounds thru various gestures, the voice is talking about me.
ON DANGEROUS WOMEN *:
It took twenty-five years to finally jump in and make these two CDs, thanks to Mimi Johnson’s perseverance, and Melody Sumner Carnahan’s patience.
After eschewing releasing any solo recordings, I now have less reluctance to committing to works detached from performance. It has been long enough for me to feel that the listener does not need to witness my gestures to make sense of the music. Except for Sombre Dimanche and Conversation, all these pieces were recorded in live performance.
This collection of early works covers a period where I moved from doing live mixing with cassettes, homemade analog synths and objects in the early eighties to working with MIDI, MAX software and “off the shelf” synths and samplers. These works were for the most part anchored around Melody Sumner Carnahan’s texts which I eventually performed with my lady’s glove. Melody’s fantastic writings provided me with characters and behaviors which I could inhabit with the music. Not represented here are the later pieces (not released) which I performed without voice and with MAX-MSP. I eventually put away the lady’s glove and built the Spring Spyre which applies machine learning to live synthesis. Two of these works were recently released on Black Truffle.
This CD is dedicated to both my teacher Robert Ashley, who encouraged me to perform when at Mills College in 1980 and who always showed so much care and attention and to my daughter Chinzalée Sonami who had to continuously share the sounds and the roads.
Special thanks to Mimi Johnson, Carol Parkinson, Melody Sumner Carnahan, Maggi Payne, Chinzalée Sonami , Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly), Paul DeMarinis, Brendan Glasson, David Wessel and Brian Laczko.
* the title comes from a line in Manananggal: “A dangerous woman, feeding a fantasy”
Mastering Engineer and co-producer: Brendan Glasson
All pieces BMI © Sonami / Sumner Carnahan
Produced in part through the Harvestworks Artist in Residence Program 1993, 2002 and 2010
Laetitia Sonami is a pioneering French sound artist and performer known for her innovative use of technology in her work. After studying with Eliane Radigue in Paris, she moved to the United States in the late seventies to pursue her electronic music studies.
Sonami has created several unique instruments for live performance, amongst which the lady’s glove and her current Spring Spyre which applies Machine Learning to real time audio synthesis.
Sonami’s work often explores themes of embodiment and is credited for inspiring the many offshoots from her gestural controllers. She has exhibited and performed at major international festivals and venues and has mentored many young artists in the field. https://sonami.net
Melody Sumner Carnahan’s innovative fiction has found form for decades in collaborations with musicians, artists, and composers, including Robert Ashley and Laetitia Sonami. Carnahan has provided stories, lyrics, and prose for recordings, installations, video, film, and live performance, receiving acknowledgements, commissions, and awards. With 13 books in print, and numerous short works published in national and international publications, she is founding editor of Burning Books. sumnercarnahan.org, burningbooks.org
Marie Goyette studied music in Montréal and London. She has been living in Berlin since 1989. Her work as a composer was defined by her love of classical orchestral music – basically, stealing from her favorite repertoire and re-arranging it as if it was new. In Manananggal though, she was still experimenting with the STEIM technology. As an actor, Marie plays in theaters and films all around Europe, and she regularly dances in Trajal Harrell’s company.
Brendan Glasson (b. Providence, RI) is a musician and engineer living and working in Oakland, CA. His engineering credits include work with Meredith Monk, Zeena Parkins, William Winant, and Briana Marela. Brendan collaborates in several projects—Risa with Mitch Stahlmann, a duo with Sally Decker, and he plays synthesizers in Chris Cohen’s band. His solo work appears on Debacle Records.
Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) essay “Remove The Instrument”- June 2025