Richard Lainhart
Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker - a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he's been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.
Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, Field Studies, Infrequency, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 150 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape (http://www.arts-electric.org/stories/081005_newyorksoundscape.html).
Lainhart's animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film "A Haiku Setting" won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for "No Other Time", a full-length inter performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.
You can find examples of his music and digital artworks at his website, http://www.otownmedia.com. Some of his short films are available at http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart. Samples of his demo and training videos are available at http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart.
quotes
"Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion - sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments - and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound." (Waterfront Week)
[His] "music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can't quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose." (The Village Voice).
"He's evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism." (Peter Marsh, BBC)
Releases:
Richard Lainhart
The Wave Sounding Sea
Richard Lainhart
The Course of the River