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Tracking Lucidity
It took Michael Halaas two years to produce his latest CD,
The Lucidity Project. It wasn’t just that he has a full-time
day job as associate director of web and multimedia services at the Medical
School. The 45-minute disc features piano, guitar, cello, vocals, drums
and other percussion, often simultaneously—but only two musicians:
Halaas, ’93, and the well-known cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, a 20-year
veteran of the Kronos Quartet. That required a painstaking process of separately
recording the many parts for each instrument, then layering together the
tracks, up to 80 or 90 in some cases. Halaas describes the 10 works—nine
composed by him—as “contemporary classical.” Others might
call his music New Age: simple melodic lines backed by pulsing, tidelike
rhythms. Think Pachelbel’s Canon in D—with tribal tangents
and the odd excursion to India. Halaas has nine other CDs
to his credit: four solo piano, two multi-instrumental and three with the
singer Nyree (Belleville, ’94), as “the girl & I.”
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