For the uninitiated, Princeton University's Dr. Paul Lansky would appear the very epitome of ivory towered pretension, peering down from his endowed chair with the Ivy's best derision.
He's been writing computer music well before there was such an idiom, and decades before the devices themselves could fit in a single room.
Furthermore, his most popular work, Idle Chatter, is a series of algorithmically generated, granularly synthesized and stochastically mixed speech synthesis pieces.
Hell, he even studied with the late Milton Babbitt, the farsighted, avuncular éminence grise of American integral serialism.
In reality, though, Paul Lansky is an affable, charmingly geeky guy with some really great stories--like the time he caught Karlheinz Stockhausen tripping balls, or when one of his students jumped into a pool from a sixth-story dorm room window.
(Just do not get him started on the whole analog-versus-digital thing.)
And despite his admittedly arcane techno-musico pursuits and highly stylized polemics--where phrases such as "excitation mechanisms" and "linear predictive coding" are thrown around like ones and zeroes in an A-D converter--he's influenced everyone from that other Karlheinz (Essl, that is) to Radiohead, even.
Incidentally, if the opening of "Idioteque" from Y2K's Kid A sounds a bit too familiar, then you must have heard Lansky's first true computer composition, Mild und Leise.
Written way back in 1973 on Princeton's only available computer at the time (a punch card IBM 360/91 mainframe with a whopping single MB of memory), the piece relies heavily on Wagner's infamous "Tristan chord" and the then new technique of FM synthesis developed by Stanford's computer music czar John Chowning.
How, then, did Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood get a hold of the piece in order to sample it?
Apparently, he found one of the only 7,000 copies of the 1975 Columbia/Odyssey LP Electronic Music Winners on which Lansky's piece debuts...further proving that Radiohead used to be the world's best read/heard rock band.
Listen closely, and if you still don't hear the resemblance, then you've got to be as deaf, dumb and inert as one of Lansky's machines.
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