Mary Jane Leach - Pipe Dreams II / III LP

The “Pipe Dreams II / III” LP by Mary Jane Leach is released on Modern Love and comprises two side-long organ works, recorded in 2023 at Miry Concertzaal in Ghent and in 2024 at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne. Both pieces build on Leach’s early fascination with church-organ sonorities; the composer uses sustained tones, targeted changes of registration, and psychoacoustic beating to shape dense webs of overtones and low-frequency pulsations. “Pipe Dreams II” was conceived as a score written in response to a specific instrument in Ghent, with choreographed stop changes, while “Pipe Dreams III” unfolded improvisationally on the newer, computer-controlled console at St. Peter; Leach describes listening to the beat patterns as the basis of her perception of time.

The Modern Love edition emphasizes the instrumental and acoustic character of the recordings and situates the material stylistically in the realm of downbeat / electronica / leftfield without flattening the pieces’ organic sonic logic. Mastering was handled by Rashad Becker; the vinyl edition is limited and foregrounds the physical listening experience of the organ’s resonances. The “Pipe Dreams II / III” LP continues Leach’s engagement with antiphonal spaces and microtonal beating and expands the scope of her organ work beyond the original “Pipe Dreams” from 1989.