Ocean & Cricket Music

Walter De Maria (born in Albany, California, in 1935) is one of the main exponents of the artistic movement called Land Art, to which he moved after an initial experience as a sculptor in the field of Minimal Art (some of his works from this period, such as "Balldrop" from 1961, are found at the Guggenheim Museum in New York).

Between the 1960s and 1970s he began to intervene directly on the territory with his monumental earth sculptures: in 1968, for example, he drew parallel lines with lime in the Mojave Desert, in California, while in 1977, on the occasion of documenta, the large contemporary art exhibition that takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years, he drove a metal rod into the ground for a kilometer.

His most famous work, however, remains without a doubt "The Lightning Field" (1977): in this monumental installation located in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert, De Maria seeks the complicity of nature to stage an ever-extraordinary event. After having stuck 400 pointed metal poles vertically into the ground over an area of approximately 3 square kilometers, he exploits their lightning rod effect during storms, collecting and multiplying the power of lightning to create a grandiose light show (pictured).
[from Wikipedia]

Not everyone knows, however, that De Maria has also created some sound works in which he himself plays the drums and mixes them with field recordings, now available on UbuWeb.

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