BILL BURNS

Dogs And Boats and Airplanes Choir

(Big Pond Small Fish) LP (lathe cut) $30.00

A collaborative effort by this “seriously idiosyncratic” conceptual artist and a hundred children between the ages of eight and twelve, who chorally mimic dogs, boats and airplanes in a libretto of their own making. Side A was originally devised as incidental music for Burns’s book Dog and Boats and Airplanes Told In The Form Of Ivan The Terrible. On the B-Side, the children voice the sounds of dogs lapping milk, a tugboat, a kennel, and an airplane cockpit with their “guttural and throaty resonances…, whispers, blows, whistles…, elaborate … and dexterous manipulations [that are unsettling because of their resemblance to] death moans,” observes The Senses And Society. “The sonances reproduced by the students represent a clash between the animals of the natural world and the vehicles of industrial society…. The sonic disharmony … reveals intractable tensions.” Plain white jacket with information embossed on it. Edition of 75.