Lifehouse is a project Pete Townsend can't bring himself to give up on. In the liner notes for this double album, he refers to as "a book that simply will not let itself be closed".
It was first conceived in 1971 both as an ambitious Sci-Fi rock-opera and as a film script, presumably with the aim of following on from the huge global impact of Tommy.
When things didn't pan out quite as planned, the best of the songs wound up as the core of the Who's Next album and the futuristic story eventually became a relatively modest musical radio play which was first broadcast by the BBC in 1999.
In 2007, the theoretical principles underpinning Townsend's musical vision morphed into The Lifehouse Method, a now defunct website which was conceived in collaboration with mathematician and composer Lawrence Ball and software developer Dave Snowdon.
At the core of Townsend's concept was the idea that unique musical compositions could be created from computerised biographical data. Such a notion must have seemed outlandish in the seventies but in our hyper-digitalised 21st century it no longer seems so far-fetched.
As someone who is billed as a "master innovator of algorithmic composition", Lawrence Ball is a man well qualified to evolve a system he calls 'Harmonic Maths' to turn Townsend's fantasy into a reality.
Ball wrote a software programme which enabled material to be arranged on a synthesized sequencer. He has taken personal characteristics supplied by website participants ("sitters") and shaped this raw data into "melodic streams".
Disc One is subtitled 'Imaginary Sitters' and comprises eleven five minute tracks built from ten, 30 second segments. All but two are simply identified as 'sitter' and numbered from 9 to 17 (it's not clear what happened to the first eight!).
The familiar loop of Baba O'Riley are the first sounds we hear on Disc One - the intro to a track entitled Meher Baba Piece, named after the spiritual teacher and inspirational source for the famous Who track. The other track with a 'real' name is named Victoria.
|
The random and repetitive nature of these pieces is intentional and, in a website interview, Ball compares the shape shifting techniques to the hypnotic effect you hear in Steve Reich's Piano Phase.
Disc Two - Imaginary Galaxies - has three twenty minute tracks of slow "meditative and mostly orchestral music" dedicated respectively to the memory of Syd Barrett, Soft Machine's Hugh Hopper and Gyorgy Ligeti.
The latter dedication to the Hungarian makes the most sense, musically speaking, as these longer pieces have a cosmic quality that might be a homage to the composer best known from the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Taken as a whole the "structured yet sprawling" two CD set , co-produced by Townsend and Bob Lord , has running time of 116 minutes.
It's hard to imagine fans of The Who rushing to buy it and lovers of ambient minimalism will find pieces colder and less energising than that of modern classical composers like Reich or Phillip Glass.
Ultimately, it's a case of the concept being more interesting than the content but a quote by Ball suggests that a marketing strategy aimed at insomniacs might be onto a winner: "I hope the listener feels as if held in a sonic cradle, watching an intricate musical mobile".
Method Music Website
|
