Ferrari, Luc

***Far-West News is the late LUC FERRARI’s three-part aural travelogue of time that he and his wife BRUNHILD MEYER spent in the American Southwest in 1998. The album is constructed from field recordings, narration, and overlaid electronic-music fragments. The electronic interruptions read as representations of musical accompaniment that likely existed in Luc Ferrari’s brain to keep things interesting—herky-jerky musical phrases are slathered ex post facto atop the sounds of a foundry, a Garth Brooks-ish singer-songwriter, a walk in Death Valley. These David Lynchian sonic interruptions of the everyday have a found object quality that’s central to Far-West News. There’s a steady macro-rhythm of cars passing along the highway, recalling the basso continuo of the train in Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North.