RICHARD LAINHART
http://www.otownmedia.com
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, Infrequency,
VICMOD, 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 & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for
"No Other Time", a full-length intermedia 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.
"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)
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