Living in a small town right on Interstate 95, it’s not hard to identify Lansky’s influence with this piece. Although the sound of the travelling vehicles may come as an annoyance to many in the town, I have often been fascinated by the way they reverberate and stretch across the corn fields. The wispy sound imitates the wind, but like it’s been reflected and multiplied, as though it’s gone through a chorus filter or something. What results is less of the sound of the vehicle itself, but rather a ghost of it: a brief, stationary capture of a moving object that came, past, and gone.
These kinds of sounds are the star of the show in Paul Lansky’s Ride: a twenty-minute electro-acoustic piece transforming traffic into spacious chords and ambiance. These chords swell and decay throughout the piece but it’s hard to find the space between the notes, every tone sounds somehow bled into the next to create one super-tone. Whispers slide across one ear to the other, like a passing vehicle. Although these sounds literally depict motion, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the piece is quickly moving, at least not in a traditional sense with musical phrases. And yet, somehow, I found myself as a listener constantly feeling as though I’ve arrived in a new place. It is like sitting in a moving car, watching other objects pass by. You do not feel like you are moving, but rather the world around you is moving swiftly past. And yet, by the end of the journey, you have transported to a new physical space.
This ambiguous sense of motion is dreamlike: I find myself in different places but it’s usually hard for me to place how I got there. The voices that appear in two different instances in the piece really emphasize this feeling. There are many voices, all saying something, but none of them are speaking to you, the listener. Rather, it’s merely as though the listener is passing by the speaking voices, uninterested in what they might be saying. The second instance is a little different: the voices have been completely transformed into instruments. Two different groups of voices can be heard, separated by stereo placement: one that is pitch and time shifted beyond intelligible words, and the other group speaking unison “shots”, like single letters, to create some confusing rhythmic intensity. The piece ends with what sounds like the clean, raw recordings of vehicles in passing, finally confirming the source of those dreamlike, spacious sounds.
ben_making_sounds 
Ben, I really like what you had to say about this, and now the piece actually makes a little more sense to me. I could not figure out where the inspiration came from, probably because I was so stuck on the idea of ride referring to riding a horse! It’s cool how you could really connect from personal experience what was going on in the piece.
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Nice response, Ben. I think the term that might be applied to Lansky’s piece is “cinematic,” in that it has such strong visual suggestions, especially in terms of place. He often talks about music as creating its own world, and this piece seems to visit several distinct ones.
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