“There’s a story about a white man who went to India early on and he heard some guy sitting there playing one note. He said, “How come you’re playing one note all the time?” The guy said, “You know you Westerners are always looking for your notes. I found mine.” And I think it’s his sense that you don’t have to go somewhere, you don’t have to impress anyone, but you get involved with the frequencies and it becomes a vehicle for meditation.” LaMonte Young
A place for: a trip far away from planet Earth in the middle of the big apple
LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s permanent art installation is a portal to alternate realities in a Manhattan loft. When we think of New York’s experimental world of modern classical, 1960’s Fluxus avant-garde and 1970s minimalism, it’s been said that “John Cage was the universe and La Monte Young, its heart.” Young’s art and vision secretly shaped contemporary Western music.
Created in 1993 together with Young’s wife, visual artist Marian Zazeela, this permanent installation is the culmination of 40 years of their work. The Dream House is in fact an environment that pairs Young’s continuous sine wave composition with Zazeela’s Magenta Lights piece. And for the last 20 years, Young and Zazeela’s Church St loft in Tribeca became a space for sound and light to become physical, and for humans to experience a new form of interaction with human senses and the things that we go beyond what we can see and hear. The tones resonate so much that your whole body vibrates, the light design is soft and otherworldly… The result is a physical meditation that opens up a portal to whatever dimension you are headed to.
“Sound and light can be experienced as a new form or new media: the ‘sound and light environment’. The experience of the two mediums together as one requires a new, or at least different, mode of attention.”