In their notes for its original vinyl release in 1979, Stephen Ruppenthal and Larry Wendt locate Charles Amirkhanian’s Lexical Music in relation to “text-sound composition,” a recently developed hybrid artform given its name in 1967 by two distinguished Swedish exponents, Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson. According to Johnson’s own description, text-sound composition is “a sort of borderline form between electronic music and poetry in which the works are based on read texts, which are then used both as a source of sound and as semantic material- sometimes in combination with electronic and concrete sounds.” As a borderline form, text-sound composition emerged within a much bigger picture, a shifting paradigm in the arts, and the loosening up and reconfiguration of social practices and relationships more generally.

Lexical Music is an elegant, multi-faceted and persuasive instance of intermedia creativity. Its supple polyphonic skeins of interwoven words and non-verbal utterances may bring to mind at various points the rhythmic impetus of Brion Gysin’s permutation poems, the processual development of Steve Reich’s early tape compositions, the variable flow of Meredith Monk’s vocal choreography, Jackson Mac Low’s aleatory mantras or Alvin Lucier’s probes into acoustic phenomenology, (not to mention the chanting of Ba-Benzele pygmies, which Amirkhanian acknowledges as a source for “Mugic”). Yet the strong and distinctive American accent which this record brings to the field of text-sound composition is essentially Amirkhanian’s own, underpinned firmly in its rhythms by his training as a percussionist, and spiced with his wit and evident relish for words.