Adam Lutz - Tongueless Echoes (2023)

On his debut album ‘Tongueless Echoes’ Michigan-born and Manhattan-based composer and sound artist Adam Lutz takes a deep dive into his artistic identity. Taking inspiration from ancient Greek prose and exploring the gamut of his compositional processes Lutz delves into modular synthesis as the core of his electro-acoustic practice.

The title of the album is derived from a line of verse called ‘Pastoral Solitude’ by the Greek writer Satyrus (also the title of Lutz’s first single), which reads, “Along this fertile pasture-land tongueless Echo sings in answer to the birds, with late-crying voice.” “I went straight into experimenting with sounds and rewired my computer outputs to go directly into my modular synthesizer. I started putting sketches down in notation software and playing them through the synth, trying a variety of combinations and parameters with these different sketches before moving to another one and repeating the process.”

In moving to New York City to undertake his master’s degree at NYU Lutz found a new artistic voice for himself combining the concert music he had always studied and written and the electronic music he loved. “I remember feeling pulled in many different directions, some of which felt like they were in opposition to others. On the one hand, there’s the concert world where most of my previous work and my professor’s work existed and, on the other, was the electronic world where my casual interests have always been. What I was often working through while working on this music was the identity crisis of what music I wanted to make: was it the “real” music of the concert stage or the “fake” music of the electronic world?”

“It was a few months before I began seriously working on these pieces that I first started getting into modular synthesis, and this world blew me away. It had been a significant amount of time since I had felt that excited by and enraptured by a musical thing. Though some pieces use it more obviously than others, every piece on the album is using the modular equipment in some way or another.”