Deep Listening

This 1989 album was the first manifestation of the phrase that would define Pauline Oliveros’s music for the rest of her life. Improvisations with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis were recorded in a two million gallon underground water cistern with a 45 second reverberation time. They had to learn to literally play with the space they were in as another part of their group, with everything drenched in the sustained echoes of itself, and the tiniest movement amplified to huge proportions. The results show the restraint they learned, and how they learned to make listening the greatest tool of their playing as the sea of reverberations led the way. This is kind of the opposite of ambient: you could try and have it as background music but it compels you to listen to that flow of endless layering as it manages to be both minuscule and unimaginably vast.