Daniel Lentz (born in Pennsylvania in 1942) studied with Alvin Lucier at Brandeis in Boston, where he created his first pieces of live-electronic music theater (A Piano Piece, 1965; Ecumenical Council, 1965; Gospel Meeting, 1965; Paul and Judy Meet the Time Tunnel, 1966; Paul and Judy Meet Startrek, 1966; Hi-yo Paint, 1968) and upon graduation, after a few months in Europe, in 1968 was hired by UC Santa Barbara, where he remained for two years. There he he staged the performances Air Meal Spatial Delivery (1969) and Work of Crow (1970), and founded the conceptual ensemble California Time Machine that began his collaboration with Harold Budd and visual artist Wolfgang Stoerchle.

Many of his pieces were clearly satirical and provocative: he was fired from UC Santa Barbara for staging Love And Conception (February 1969), a piece in which two young people (a male pianist and a female page-turner) climb on all fours onto a piano, hide under the lid, and make love on its strings. Two years later he would stage Kissing Song for twenty-four vocalists engaged in making sounds while inserting their tongues into each other's mouths.

His interest in tape-delay and tape-loop technology began with You Can't See The Forest Music (1971), in which he developed what he called the "cascading echo system", a system for generating cascading echoes of the human voice. Here the three performers are both speakers, wine drinkers and instrumentalists: they play wine glasses and drink from them so that the sound of the glasses keeps changing.

Canon and Fugue (1971) and You Can't See The Forest Music (1971) pioneered the technique of breaking down a text into a fragmented stream of consciousness, a method that peaked with Songs of the Sirens (1973), a multi-layered piece for a trio of clarinet, cello and piano and looped vocals that break down a Homeric text into isolated syllables.

Lentz then arrived at Missa Umbrarum (1973) for eight voices, bells, toys and wine glasses. Protagonist is the phonemic, strongly accentuated singing and a slowed-down, mechanized language of suspensions and bursts, which breaks down the word by assigning each single syllable its own sound identity, as if to reduce the song itself to a series of tuned bells. The Latin text of the mass gradually emerges from the superimposition of cycles and cycles of those syllables, each cycle delayed by a few seconds so as to be superimposed on the subsequent ones. At the same time, the singers rub their wine glasses and occasionally drink some wine, thus changing the note of their glass. Even the fact that the performers gradually get drunk is part of the score of the piece! (The version recorded on disc in 1985 is different from the original one from 1973).

Similar vocal processes but on a larger scale were carried out by the ensemble San Andreas Fault (eight to twelve singers, electronic keyboards and percussionists), for example in North American Eclipse (1974, originally titled O-Ke-Wa), a piece inspired by Native American dancing, that required the singers to wear small bells to their ankles and to walk around the audience while the percussionists played in the center of the circle. Here the phonemic decomposition diverges from instead weaves a celestial and impalpable flow of songs and percussion, a harmony without discontinuity over which the solemn vocals of the singers alternately soar.

For his friend Wolfgang Stoerchle (who died in 1976 in a car accident) Lentz composed a Requiem (1976) for Latin text, wine glasses, kalimbas and harps.

Other vocal compositions of this period include: Senescence Sonorum (1970), a double concerto for amplified body sounds, choir and orchestra; Sun Tropes (1975) for seven solo voices, recorders and kalimbas; Composition in Contrary and Parallel Motion (1977) for 16 solo voices, percussion and four keyboards; and The Elysian Nymph (1978) for eight solo voices and eight marimbas.

Then came the lengthy, stormy, 36-minute multi-sonata Point Conception (1979) for nine overdubbed echoes of pianos, whose score contains only octaves (both melodic and harmonic) placed in rapid and more or less chaotic succession.

Loops and additive processes propel Uitoto (1980), inspired by an Amazonian tribe.

The mini-album After Images (1981) is mostly devoted to the ambient music of Dancing on the Sun (1980), a minor work.

In 1982 Lentz moved from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, where he formed an ensemble featuring soprano Jessica Lowe and three synth players.

On The Leopard Altar (1984) gathers compositions for electronic keyboards and vocals that evoke Steve Reich's methods of gradual layering: the intricate solfeggios at the rhythm of a pressing android samba in Is It Love (1983), which degenerates into a frantic carillon of vocal fragments; the mantra Lascaux (1984) for vocalists and wine glasses, a triumph of pure and stationary frequencies in slow and delicate evolution; and the Dadaist ballet Wolf Is Dead (1979) for solo voices and percussion, another exercise in metronomic vivisection of vocal counterpoint.

The Crack In The Bell (1987) gathers another major vocal composition, namely The Crack In The Bell (1986) for vocal soloist (soprano Jessica Lowe), three keyboards and chamber orchestra, besides Lullaby and Dream King.

Leveraging Steve Reich's Drumming experiment and the avant-garde vocalism of Meredith Monk and Joan LaBarbara, Lentz brought voice-based minimalism to its formal perfection. Eastern harmonies, Gregorian chants and abstract structures coined a new form of Renaissance song.

Other works from this period include: Time Is a Trick (1985), Topanga Tango for Chamber Ensemble (1985), Bacchus with Wineglasses (1985), Wild Turkeys for three synthesizers (1985) La Tache with Wineglasses (1987), Wolfmass (1988) for vocalist, keyboards and percussion, An American in L.A. (1989) for synth and orchestra, Nightbreaker for four pianos (1990), and Cathedral of Ecstasy (1990) for vocalists, keyboards and percussion.

Talk Radio (1991), for vocalist and chamber ensemble, is an unusually more varied composition that incorporates Caribbean and hip-hop rhythms and quotes from medieval melodies, while maiming ordinary texts from the radio.

In 1991 he was hired by Arizona State University to start a new interdisciplinary arts and performance program and moved to the Sonoran desert of Arizona.

He composed Orgas-Mass for soprano, baritone, and chamber ensemble (1991) and collaborated with Harold Budd on Music for 3 Pianos (1992) and Walk Into My Voice (1995), but mainly devoted his compositions, such as Apologetica (1995), Temple of Lament (1996), A Tiger In The Garden (1998) and The Insect & the Woman (2000), to the landscape of the desert.

Apologetica (New Albion, 1998), composed in 1995, is a 14-movement concert for choir, chamber ensemble and MIDI keyboards, and one of his most ambitious works.

The album Lips (2024) gathers the brief Funke (1965), Songs of the Sirens, North American Eclipse, Uitoto, Requiem, and Talk Radio.

Daniel Lentz died in 2025 at the age of 83.