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An Itinerary Through Northern Europeby François Couture in electrocd.com (Québec), February 9, 2004 |6137| This is a casual listening path, an invitation to travel — not a guided tour per se, more of an itinerary, akin to Romantic-era travel literature. So this will be a listening itinerary, an invitation to discover a highly subjective selection of electroacoustic composers from a specific corner of the world. Our destination: Northern Europe. France reigns over European electroacoustic music like a despotic queen. The persisting influence of Pierre Schaeffer’s work — even more than 50 years after the invention of what he has called “musique concrète” — and the gravitational pull of the Ina-GRM tend to hide from the rest of the world the work being accomplished elsewhere in Europe. So let’s start our journey in one of France’s neighbors, Belgium. The country owes much of its electroacoustic activity to Annette Vande Gorne, the indefatigable animator of the Musiques & Recherches center. Her music displays a strong sense of serenity, something rare in the field of tape music. Tao, a cycle about the five base elements (air, earth, metal, fire and water), remains a classic. In it she explores every possible transformation of the sounds associated to these elements with an uncommon level of artistry and poetry. A student of Vande Gorne, Stephan Dunkelman has picked up on her grace, a grace he transmutes into movement. Often the result of a collaboration with choreographers, his works are driven by an inner force that substitutes the sensuality of movement to Vande Gorne’s philosophical — almost mystical — depth. His pieces Rituellipses and Thru, Above and Between, released on the album Rhizomes, deserve your attention. A jump across the Northern Sea and we set foot on English ground. Birmingham has become an important creative node in electroacoustic music, thanks to the work of composer Jonty Harrison and his Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (better known as BEAST), a laboratory for experimentation and sound diffusion that has helped many talented composers in developing their art. Harrison’s music is an essential listen. His piece Klang (released on Évidence matérielle) ranks among the best-known electroacoustic works of the last 25 years. His precise sound constructions and his distinctive way of compressing sound matter into streams of energy put him up there with Pierre Henry, Francis Dhomont and Bernard Parmegiani. One can follow the traces of his techniques into the works of Adrian Moore, one of his students, especially in the latter’s fondness for putting simple sound sources (marker on a white board, tin foil) through complex transformations. Sieve, from the album Traces, uses a catchy playfulness to make this transformative process transparent. Denis
Smalley was born and raised in New-Zealand, but he has been living in the UK since
the mid-‘70s. His contributions to the acousmatic corpus and to the development of
sound diffusion make him not only the contemporary but in a sense the acolyte of Harrison.
Furthermore, the two composers share a similar interest in form and in the choreographed
displacement of abstract sound objects through space and time. Wind Chimes (on
Impacts intérieurs) and
Base Metals (on Sources/Scènes) are good illustrations of the slightly cold yet fascinating
beauty of his music. John Young, one of his students — and another New-Zealander who
studied and now teaches in England), follows a similar approach, although he replaces
Smalley’s elemental sound sources with more emotionally charged
images. The works featured on his CD La
limite du bruit offer to the listener several occasions to dive into his or her
own memories, the sound of a squeaky swing or a creaky door turning into avatars of
Scandinavian electroacoustic music is still too largely ignored on our side of the Atlantic, but empreintes DIGITALes’ catalog allows us to make a short stop to round up our peregrinations. Natasha Barrett has studied with Harrison and Smalley and has been involved in BEAST, but since 1998 she has elected Norway as her base camp. There, she has stepped away from the style of her teachers and has sought inspiration in the Nordic cold. Her Three Fictions, released on Isostasie, deserve many listens. And let me bring this listening path to an end with one of the key composers in electroacoustic music today, the Swedish Åke Parmerud, whose Renaissance (on Jeu d’ombres) pays tribute to the analog synthesizer without resorting to nostalgic tricks.
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Reviewby François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), January 1, 2000 |336_5|
“… with Tao, Annette Vande Gorne
delivered an impressive work.”
Tao is a huge musique concrète cycle. There are five pieces (composed 1983-1991), one for each element of the Tao: water, fire, wood, metal and earth. Eau (Water) sounds almost untreated: splashes, drops, streams, etc. coming together in a piece the listener can visualize being interpreted live. But this “natural” approach is more and more deconstructed as one advances in the cycle. Feu (Fire) weaves sounds of burning wood with firecracker pops. Bois (Wood), one of the most interesting pieces, uses the sound of a squeaking old wooden door — a reference to Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir — as a bridge between movements. Terre (Earth) is the most substantial piece and is completely freed from the element it represents. Abstract, it still conveys a feeling of Zen transcendentalism. Francis Dhomont wrote: “Tao is the discourse of active contemplation.” True, but because of that, it suffers from monotone moments (especially in Eau and Feu), mostly because of the sound source limitations imposed by the subject. Still, with Tao, Annette Vande Gorne delivered an impressive work.
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Critiqueby Dan Warburton in Art Zéro #14 (France), January 1, 1999 |294_001|
“De l’artisanat d’une rare beauté.”
«Peut-être empreintes DIGITALes pourront-ils nous offrir bientôt un disque de Vande Gorne avec uniquement sa musique?» avais-je écrit il y a quelques mois. Et voilà un disque de 1996, Tao [IMED 9311], un très beau travail sur cinq éléments — eau, feu, bois, métal, terre — rien du tout à voir avec les conneries de Luc Besson. Les mots-clés qui se trouvent dans le dépliant central nous indique un chemin poétique — non programmatique — à suivre avec la musique. On se trouve alors dans un contexte plus figuratif que l’idéologie de base de la musique concrète («ne pas employer des sons en tant qu’instrument, mais en tant que sons sur la bande magnétique, où ils abandonnaient le côté causal: c’était plus une clarinette, c’était plus un piano — c’était un son qui avait une forme, un développement, une façon de vivre» — Ferrari). En effet, comme Luc Ferrari, Annette Vande Gorne prend ici un grand plaisir à utiliser les sons de la nature tel quel. De l’artisanat d’une rare beauté.
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Une fournée de parutions québécoisesby Carol Bergeron in Le Devoir (Québec), January 23, 1993 |147_5| La jeune musique Plus modestement, puisqu’elle occupe un créneau sûrement moins rentable, celui de l’électroacoustique, la maison Diffusion i MéDIA propose trois enregistrements: des musiques du Montréalais Serge Arcuri (IMED 9310) et Tao (une œuvre en cinq parties) de la Belge Annette Vande Gorne (IMED 9311). Dans la collection SONARt qui a donné, avant Noël, Ne blâmez jamais les bédouins, un théâtre musical d’Alain Thibault (IMSO 9202), s’ajoute Corazón Road, carnet de voyage sonore des Français Carole Rieussec et Jean-Christophe Camps (IMSO 9301). electrocd.com Annette Vande Gorne: Tao: reviews |
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