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Just (1972)

Charles Amirkhanian

Charles Amirkhanian

Ti­tle of the com­pi­la­ti­on: 10+2:12. American Text Sound Pieces
Editor: Charles Amirkhanian
Ti­tle: Just (Charles Amirkhanian) (Track 01)
Publisher: Arch Records, Berkeley
Da­te: 1972
Me­di­um: re­cord 30 cm + insert with biographies
Cover: Robert Leverant, Sharon Stein

 

Just by Charles Amirkhanian is the first piece on his self-edited LP 10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces. It is a typical example of a text-sound composition and is based on four words: "rainbow, chug, bandit, bomb." These words are repeated in the same order in a variety of rhythms.

Charles Amirkhanian layers words and sounds on top of each other with the help of tape machines. For this, the read text is recorded and changed in various ways. The acoustically significant sounds are selected from the recorded materials and then combined and mixed into loops so that several loops played simultaneously can then be heard through the random synchronization.

The text-sound compositions are created in the recording studio by listening to the sounds on tape, putting them together, rearranging them and mixing them. The text-sound compositions have not been composed beforehand. The work is only composed in the recording studio during production.

The piece Just took on a bizarre significance in 1985, when one night in July the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk in Auckland Harbour, killing one crew member. The sabotage action was intended to stop Greenpeace's protests against ongoing French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Subsequently, French agents were captured and brought to justice for an act of international terrorism perpetrated by one of the highest security agencies and its government on New Zealand soil.

ATJ