"Lurch and Holler” is E .Liz Downing and Michael Willis. For 25 years, Liz Downing and Michael Willis have been making sounds together in different configurations such as “Lambs Eat Ivy”, “Girls’ Ranch”, “Radiant Pig” and now “Lurch and Holler”. In these musical performance art groups they have employed banjo, synthesizer, washboard, field recordings, sets and costumes to create plays and concerts, touring nationally in venues such as The Whitney, Hirshhorn Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum. They have been awarded grants such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Franklin Furnace Interdisciplinary Arts Grant and Maryland State Arts Council grants. They have received residencies from Yellow Springs Institute and the Wooster Group. Lurch and Holler has just completed their 3rd home recording, “This Pink Hue” and are creating sound fields in collaboration with experimental film makers Catherine Pancake and Julia Oldham. “Lurch and Holler” have lately been inspired by the works of Homer, Flannery O'Connor, Edith Piaf, Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman. As always, they are moved to integrate the grunts and cries of our early human ancestors with the hollering of mountain music and the twang of Tammy Wynette. The resulting experimental sound is Appalachian/techno Psychedelia. Liner notes for THIS PINK HUE: 1. NOTHING IS ABSURD When grimaces and growls, howls and clucking, no longer fully expressed the complexity of the ideas which were occurring to early humans, how did they know that what they uttered was true? When their sleeping dreams exceeded their waking experience, this invited the idea of magic, spirits… Levy-Bruhl, “How Natives Think” 1910 and “Ideas that Changed the World” by Fernandez-Armesto 2. OUR GAZE DID MOVE Once the life of Hominids was “poor, nasty, brutish and short” with no leisure for reflection, but our cousins from the Paleolithic era 40,000 years ago had lots to eat, long days of leisure and plenty of time for pondering and observing the world around them. Inspired by “Ideas that Changed the World” by Fernandez-Armesto 3. BIRDS FLYING LOW .Birds flying low to the ground….Dark shadows lifting, a rustling sound…Tall grasses bending from the weight of the birds….flying low to the ground. 4. OMENS From book XXIV of “The Odyssey” attributed to Homer 800BCE 5. A FLY’S LULLABYE 6. LOOKING To witness an act of violence or disrespect harms the viewer.. To witness an act of kindness or love heals the viewer. 7. AM I BORN TO DIE, An Existentialist poem written by Charles Wesley in 1753 and made popular in the Civil War era. 8. LAUGHING KAZOO, Tickled him to death. 9. PENELOPE In “The Odyssey” Queen Penelope devised a scheme to stall the suitors, a challenge in which the suitors must string the mighty bow of Odysseus. 10. GHOSTS, Ghosts hurry down the hall to hell. 11. “WEATHERS”, is adapted from a poem by Thomas Hardy. 12. DOGS OUTSIDE, PIANO INSIDE 13. MALIGNANT MIST Odysseus, disguised as a tramp prepares to kill the graceless crew who sought after his wife and trashed his home. All the while they thought Odysseus dead. 14. THIS PINK HUE “ We are not to confine this PINK HUE to mysticism, nor are we to reduce it to an enticing game. We are to leave this pink hue suspended between abyss and aspiration.” Pierre-Albert Jourdan, referring to Coleridge’s “Notebooks” 15. HIBERNATION DREAMS, DREAMING WHILE HIBERNATING