Bruce Lacey // The Spacey Bruce Lacey - Film Music And Improvisations Vol. 2 LP

50年代より映画音楽やメディアアートなどの分野で特異な存在となったBruce Laceyの音源集。奇想天外な音が飛び出す、今聴いても新鮮な作品です。

レーベルその他作品はこちら /// Click here to see more Trunk Records releases available at Tobira.

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Description by Jonny Trunk, Trunk Records (2014):

"Bruce Lacey is everywhere and nowhere. He’s there only if you’re prepared to dig about deep enough. You’ll find him through every decade since the 1950s, in all the important places doing all sorts of interesting things with all the interesting people. A true artist and eccentric, he only appeared in my life properly after a tip-off from a Trunk records collector and musician, Ben Reed. Ben had called me and said I should start listening to Bruce Lacey music. He told me it featured a lot on his films, it was raw, strange, honest, involved naked people and sex and that it was all very “Trunk”. So I watched and listened. And two years on we have all this (two Bruce Lacey LPs and one Bruce Lacey CD) which really needs to be heard and, dare I say, “experienced”. It’s music from his art films and music improvised for his self-released tapes.

As you will discover, Bruce is an extraordinary man, an inspiring, inventive genius. I went to see him and when we started digging about in his various barns and archives we came across bits of the monophonic synth he’d used in the 1970s. This is the synth you will hear throughout many of these recordings. Bruce bought it from an advert in the back of Exchange & Mart. The seller was a schoolboy who’d made the synth using instructions and kits from Practical Electronics magazine. A week later, Bruce bought a keyboard from another advert in Exchange & Mart from a different schoolboy who’d made it using other instructions from Practical Electronics. Over the next few years Lacey set about improving and expanding this monophonic monster, improvising switch matrix systems, new noise generators, oscillators and filters using items scrounged or bought from electronic retailers or government surplus stores such as Proops in Tottenham Court Road. In the mid 1970s Brian Eno (a friend of Lacey’s daughter’s boyfriend at the time) visited the Lacey studio, which was in an old shoe factory in Hackney. Lacey recalls Eno’s thoughts about his synth at the time: “Eno told me that when he switches on his VCS3, it is silent. But when he turns on my synth it is alive, it bubbles”.

Lacey also recalls selling tapes of his music at the Acme Gallery in 1979. He sold a tape of Earth Spirit to a punk (from a local boutique), who later came back to buy another. The music then turned up in the 1979 Arena documentary “Who Is Poly Styrene”, playing in the van as X-Ray Spex travel between gigs. Poly Styrene compared the music to Tangerine Dream. Lacey still has no idea who Tangerine Dream are or what they sound like.

As well as the homemade synth and regular electronic improvisations, Lacey had also dabbled with alternative recording techniques and concrète principles. For his soundtrack to Everybody’s Nobody in 1960 he used a Ferrograph tape machine, beer bottles, children’s rattles, a typewriter and wetted corks as his sound palette. On other recordings he often played his monophonic synth at the same time as manipulating his voice through sound boxes and connecting new technology to old. The improvised music from Ancient Forces, Earth Spirit and Cycles Of The Serpent are all influenced by Lacey’s stone circle visits. The electronic squeaking soundtrack to Funky Dance is based on Lacey’s x-wife scratching balloons into positive film.

What I found fascinating talking to Bruce about his improvised music was that he could never play live. That’s because the way he makes music is quite clearly defined: he goes to his studio. He sits. He waits for The Muse to descend. As and when she does he will turn on the TEAC tape machine and begin to play. When The Muse leaves him, he finishes playing and turns the tape off. There is no telling if and when The Muse will even appear, so playing live would always be impossible, especially when you consider the pressure an audience would put on such a personal interaction. On a visit to Virgin Records in the late 1970s, Lacey played one of his tapes to an A&R man. The music made a good impression, but when questioned whether the music could be re-created live in a studio Lacey confessed he could not, and any pending record deal promptly flew out of the window.

I will leave a fuller and more fascinating story of Bruce now to William Fowler of the BFI (and The Flip Side), who is a true Lacey fan and expert.

Thanks for listening as always"

Artist : Bruce Lacey

Label : Trunk Records