vozes em órbita

«on February 20, 1962 at 9:47:39 am EST, John Glenn rode Friendship 7 from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 14 to become an American hero. Over the Indian Ocean on his first orbit, Glenn became the first American to witness the sunset from above 100 miles. Awed but not poetically inclined, he described "this moment of twilight is simply beautiful. The sky in space is very black, with a thin band of blue along the horizon." On the nightside of Earth, nearing the Australian coastline, Glenn made his planned star, weather, and landmark observations. Within voice radio range of the Muchea, Australia, tracking station, Glenn and Gordon Cooper began a long space-to-Earth conversation. The astronaut reported that he felt fine, that he had no problems, and that he could see a very bright light and what appeared to be the outline of a city. Cooper answered that he probably saw the lights of Perth and Rockingham. Glenn also said that he could see stars as he looked down toward the "real" horizon - as distinguished from the haze layer he estimated to be about seven or eight degrees above the horizon on the nightside - and clouds reflecting the moonlight. "That sure was a short day," he excitedly told Cooper. "That was about the shortest day I've ever run into."» (1st american in orbit: John Glenn @ The Ultimate Space Place)


"1975 saw the release of Kosugi's best solo recording, Catch Wave. This features on one side "an excerpt from a meta-media solo improvisation" utilising heavily-processed violin, voice, radio and oscillators (the latter modified via wind and light) to create a massive drone piece. Side two is "a triple performance by a solo vocalist" where a vocal phrase is taken and electronically modified until it loses any meaning other than as part of the wave form. This LP represented a continuation of his interest in the heterodyne phenomenon, where alternating currents of different frequencies combined to produce new frequencies, the sum and difference of the original frequencies. This was something he had worked with on earlier recordings and continued to be important through later works."(in: Noise:NZ/JAPAN)
Em 1997, Takehisa Kosugi re-interpretou esta obra com a performance "Catch-Wave '97".


"Voices, language and space… they interested me even in the early 60s when I wrote The Emperor of Ice Cream for the ONCE Festivals in Ann Arbor. Since each of us knows so much about the behavior of the voice - intimate endearments, rage at a distance - it is an ideal vehicle for auditory spatial illusions (all the more when in the service of language and its powers of invocation). In the early 70s, at the Center for Music Experiment in La Jolla, I heard daily rehearsals of the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble as they perturbed vocal norms. Evenings, I read my daughter to sleep trying to capture, for each character in the story, an individual and consistent vocal behavior. She was a demanding critic, and stimulated a good deal of nocturnal reflection about vocal identity. Electronics, at first analogue, later digital systems, offered rather precise control over auditory space (a particular sound’s size, location, distance, the character of the host space in which it was heard). I sought spare but evocative texts and tried to conjure up unfamiliar yet appropriate vocal behaviors with which to present them. The five works in the series thus far share a concern with the potential of auditory spatial imaging: this is a subject still only tentatively broached. They attempt to create a personal theater through the mind’s ear. Yet they are distinct. Three of them are presented here." (Roger Reynolds about Voice Space)


Takehisa Kosugi - Mano Dharma '74 + Wave code #e-1 (Catch-Wave) 1975 (re-editado em 2002)
John Glenn - America's first man in orbit, 7'', lados A e B, narração de Lt. Col. John Powers, 1962
Roger Reynolds - Still (Voicespace I) 1975 + The Palace (Voicespace IV) 1980, barítono Philip Larson