Shimmering, pulsing music built of unique additive structures for singers, keyboards, and tuned wineglasses by seminal West Coast experimental and post-experimental composer Daniel Lentz.

John Schaefer of WNYC’s New Sounds writes: “On the Leopard Altar, with its multiple vocal, keyboard and wineglass parts, haunting neo-romantic melodies, and unusual additive and subtractive structures, is a remarkable collection.

“Lentz's music inhabits what he terms a musical ‘state of becoming,’ where both new and
reappearing musical and textual fragments are fused through complex layering processes.
However, the real basis of his seductive music may be the dreamy impressionism of Debussy
and the lyrical voice and keyboard interaction of Schubert's lieder.”

Lentz writes about this music:
“The form and flow of Is It Love? is determined by a subtractive text/lyric process. The voices begin each line with the nearly simultaneous sounding of all the phonemes of all of the words. As the work progresses, phonemes and notes are taken away until a finished line emerges.

“Lascaux is scored for wineglasses, sixteen of which are rubbed and nine of which are struck. Other than reverb, no effects have been added to the natural sounds of the glasses.

“On the Leopard Altar consists of six songs, each of which is heard alone and in combination with those that preceded it. Each text line makes its own kind of sense, which will change when combined with other lines from which phonemes are borrowed in order to make different words and new lines.

“In Wolf Is Dead… each line of text is joined by a phonetic link to the line following it, creating a word chain (e.g., "you died" overlapping "you did"). This concept is the basis for the musical structure as well, with each chord overlapping and fusing with the one following it.

“Requiem attempts to capture the experience of hearing a lone singer in a large, empty cathedral. While this occurs, and from an entirely different space, one hears big, resonant ‘church bells’ producing an array of overtones that seem to form melodies of their own.”

REVIEWS:

“Driving energies darting and thrusting toward unseen destinations. On the Leopard Altar is a study of sonic polish and forward motion.” —Mix magazine

“Lentz is obviously a hopeless romantic—or perhaps hopelessly ecstatic. His music attains flight very quickly, and with little excess baggage.… it’s possessed of such joyful abandon that despite the paucity of sonic events at play (the drone canopies of Lascaux) the whole enterprise comes off as one elegiac noise.… Frugal, footloose and fancy-free.” —Darren Bergstein, e/i magazine

“On the Leopard Altar presents a ravishing suite of compositions created from keyboards, voices, and wineglasses…. [O]ne doesn’t merely listen but rather surrenders to its seductive pull. Well-considered pacing and stylistic contrasts are a significant part of its appeal: the first and fourth pieces surge with rush hour-like intensity, while the others are more meditative and less densely arranged. The spectacular opening piece Is It Love? recalls the mid-80s style of classical minimalism with vocal sounds seemingly kin to the solfege style of Einstein On The Beach. Closer listening, however, reveals that Lentz’s much different composition unfolds subtractively: after voices begin each line by sounding all of the words’ phonemes, those same phonemes and notes are removed until a finished line emerges. Throughout the exuberant work, lush vocal weaves breezily sail over intricate lattices of staccato keyboard patterns. Similarly spirited is the sleek roller-coaster ride Wolf Is Dead… Conversely, the languorous adagio of crystalline tones that Lentz conjures in Lascaux from sixteen rubbed and struck wineglasses is remarkable, while the album’s sparest yet most affecting work is its central title piece, a rapturous lullaby (actually six songs, each heard alone and in combination with those preceding it) featuring a glorious vocal performance by Jessica Karraker. And the most amazing thing of all? Though it sounds entirely fresh and wholly current, On the Leopard Altar was first released in 1984 on vinyl and is only now making its first appearance on CD.” —Ron Schepper, Signal to Noise magazine and Textura

“Out of print for more than two decades, Daniel Lentz’s 1984 album On the Leopard Altar was, until its recent reissue on the Cold Blue label, a lost gem of the high minimalist era in American art music. On Leopard Altar, Lentz mostly worked with the usual tools of the minimalist composer—a gamelan-influenced phased and staggered repetition of rhythmic and melodic materials; metallic, mallet instrument-derived keyboard tonalities—but his music almost always sounded different from that of others working within the genre. While earlier works of Riley, Glass, and Reich explored various aspects of trance-inducing and non-western extended forms, and the more contemporaneous compositions of John Adams brought minimalist ideas to western classical structures, Lentz was unique in the way he applied a similar vocabulary of pulse and timbre to an aesthetic that seemed rooted in the sensuous, seductive values of post-1950s popular song.… On the Leopard Altar points to the unique place the female voice can occupy in Lentz’s work. Over sparse, slow, and dreamy keyboard textures, Jessica Karraker’s intimate vocals intone a haunting, enigmatic song-poem. The mood is arresting and hypnotic, at once intellectual and seductive, perhaps even a bit redolent of beatnik-era jazz. Karraker is also at the center of Requiem, where, bathed in deep cathedral reverb and surrounded by tolling, chiming keyboards, her husky, warm-toned voice sings an eerie, slightly dissonant nocturne, creating a slightly gothic, sacred, noir-ish mood.… Lentz brings a very different palette of tonal colors to Lascaux, a slow-moving piece for tuned wine-glasses, rubbed and struck . Resonant and spacious, the piece is simply beautiful: a meditation on the amazing ringing and sustained tones that can be unlocked from vibrating crystal.… Wolf Is Dead is the album’s tour-de-force. With keyboard ensemble and vocal quartet in full minimalist interlock and pulse mode, Lentz presents a kaleidoscopic shifting and cycling of melodic and lyrical material in which musical and verbal meaning are eventually focused and dove-tailed with a wit and imagination reminiscent of Renaissance madrigal.… Like much of On the Leopard Altar, Wolf Is Dead offers elements not often found in art music: catchy melodic hooks; a pop music-influenced attention to mood, mix and detail, to the sensuous aspects of vocal timbre. Indeed, the whole album is paced like a good pop record, with peaks and valleys and a satisfying sense of dynamics. Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why it retains a decidedly non-academic freshness and immediacy—maybe even a timelessness—all these years after the minimalist tide has receded.” —Kevin Macneil Brown, Dusted magazine

“Daniel Lentz’s On the Leopard Altar features compositions for voice, keyboards and wineglasses and is an aural delight with its overtones, reverb and evocation of song space.”—Rupert Loydell, Tangents magazine (UK)

“On this album, which is nicely performed…is a good mix of short pieces. The two sections that really grabbed me are Is It Love? and Wolf Is Dead. Both set text in interesting ways, with a focus on individual phonemes that are manipulated in a formal process.” —David Toub, Sequenza 21

“This record came out first in 1984 on Icon records then quickly went out of print to my dismay. It got good notices then and I have to say it was well worth the wait. Five early compositions by Lentz are here. In Is It Love? the voices chant texts in hypnotic, subtractive patterns. It makes you think of early Glass only it’s more informal and hotwired. Lascaux for wineglass ensemble makes sound wave reverberation a positive virtue. Lentz is the champion and master of the under-appreciated wineglass. Here, as in so much of his career, he fully embraces beauty, which is almost as reckless today as it was in 1984. That’s other folks’ loss. The work is as gorgeous as all get-out, so bleak modernists were being given notice. On the Leopard Altar is mesmerizingly attractive, even lush, and the ensemble here, as on every track on this record, performs excellently. The voices are partly Glassian, but much more erotic than anything the sober Glass was coming up with. Wolf Is Dead has plenty of repetitive playfulness and is very light on its feet. Requiem takes words from a Latin Mass and might be the soundtrack for a Catholic David Lynch movie. This is one of the very best Cold Blues. Enthusiastically recommended.” —Richard Grooms, The Improvisor

“Happy days are here again. In fact, I’m sort of surprised by how happy I am that Daniel Lentz’s On the Leopard Altar is finally getting released on CD. (Has it really been over 20 years since this originally came out? Boy, does that makes me feel old…but still happy.).… Daniel Lentz emerged at a strange and exciting time for new music. For some reason, in the mid-1980s, it was hip to be pretty again…and On the Leopard Altar is one of the best documents of this unique cultural moment. Its composer, Daniel Lentz, is one of the neglected stepchildren of Minimalism—a damn shame because his…music is so sincere, unpretentious, appealing, and, well, pretty.… Vibrato-less vocals intone cryptic yet accessible texts over churning synthesizer patterns…. Clichés about love, death, and reincarnation are somehow transformed into toe-tapping confections…. A chorus of wineglasses mysteriously emanates echoing audio cathedrals…. And sometimes—I swear—it even swings! Yes, I’m happy to say that On the Leopard Altar is still as infectious and fresh as ever, effortlessly bubbling and shimmering with levity, wit, and style. It’s all so audaciously pleasant, genial, and—there’s no better word for it—lovable…. Thank you, Cold Blue, for rescuing this (almost) lost classic from obscurity.”—Stephen V. Funk, Blogcritics.org

“On the Leopard Altar…[is] playful, inventive, engaging music.” —Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb (UK)
“The panting pulse of the four voices added to the four keyboards in Is it Love? is delightful, just like the phonetic games of Wolf is Dead, featuring a similar line-up. Lascaux draws its deep harmonies from a glass harmonica—wine glasses, specifically. Simple and delicate, the voice in On the Leopard Altar is meant to be lightweight and dreamy, and the same thing applies to the more ritual voices in Requiem resonating with the electric piano’s celestial reverb.” —Classica-Repertoire (France)

“He’s a mature musician, already very active in the seventies, experimenting in sunny and nonconformist California with early loops and tape-delay with a subversive drive and a healthy dose of irony.…writing music that encompasses everything—multiple vocalists, keyboards, sonic effects, romantic melodies and forms structured in a very ariose and seductive style….. A post-modern suite, still disenchanted and meaningful, open to multiple levels of meaning.”—Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural (Italy)

“Daniel Lentz, one of the better known of the lesser known composers, gives us a good, varied look at his music in On the Leopard Altar…. Is it Love? creates out of keys and a small vocal ensemble a fascinating mix. The keys play a series of patterns in a constant interplay of continuously sounded staccato eighth notes. The vocalists form a choir of ever differing staccato patterns through a process of subtraction (according to the liners) produced in hocket style. Wolf Is Dead has a similar trajectory, but the vocal parts are less dense and hocket less used in favor of at times a contrapuntal approach. It may not perhaps be as striking as the first piece, but has much about it that keeps the attention focused. Lascaux is to me the most interesting of the more soundscaped works included here. It uses wineglasses and keyboards to create a very beautiful panorama that shimmers with overtones like ever-reverberating bells in a dream. On the Leopard Altar has a singular vocal line sung by first one soprano, then several to the accompaniment of keys. This one too has a dreamy sound but with more of a leider quality to it. There is a very lyrical side to Lentz when he wants to go that way and this is a great example. The final, short Requiem work combines bell-like sounds with a vocal part that sounds as if a single voice is singing in the middle of a great cathedral and you the listener are experiencing the sound of the voice and the resonance of the cathedral in equal proportions. So Daniel Lentz gives us two pattern pieces and three pieces more in the through-composed, soundscaped, radical tonality vein. Those latter three have great lyrical beauty. The pattern pieces remind us that Lentz makes his own way through the Reich-Glass influence so prevalent in the minimalist genre and sounds out a personal path with its own route through the thickets. It’s a captivating set of pieces that I certainly find of real interest. You may gravitate to them as well…. Recommended.”— Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review