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Reviews

by Rigobert Dittmann in Bad Alchemy #58 (Germany), May 1, 2008 |3554|

Musique pour objets en voie de disparition

Musik ’für Dasunddas + Tonband’ ist uns vertraut, aber + 13 tickende Wecker? + handbetriebene Kaffemühle? + 3 Wählscheibentelefone? + 8 Fernseher? + 2 Drucker? + automatischer Anrufbeantworter? + 12 Kaffeemaschinen? All das findet man auf Musique pour objets en voie de disparation (AM 170) von Diane Labrosse. ’En voie de disparation’ klingt ein wenig nach ’(Frauen) am Rande des Nervenzusammenbruchs’. Aber die Grande Dame der Musique actuelle wird, um ihren musikalischen Alltag erfolgreich zu gestalten, punktuell unterstützt von Marie-Soleil Bélanger (Geige), Jean Derome (Flöte), Bernard Faleise (E-Gitarre), Lori Freedman (Klarinette), Jean René (Viola) & Pierre Tanguay (Percussion), während sie selbst Akkordeon spielt und alle Zutaten elektroakustisch vermischt. Jede Mixtur reizt verspielt und effektvoll die jeweilige Rezeptur aus: Uhren ticken, Derome schnarcht, dongdongdong klopft der Morgen an die Tür, der Schläfer träumt noch, der Wecker rasselt; eine Geige geigt chinesisch angeschrägt, jemand zerpulvert Kaffebohnen, eine Maultrommel twangt, jemand summt — der Tag kann kommen; jemand wählt sich den Finger wund und reagiert auf das Besetztzeichen mit unmutigem Akkordeongewummer; Derome flötet von Weitem mit einem Tonbandgerät, das schnurrend rotiert, und die Viola zupft dazu Pizzikati; die TV-Konferenzschaltung ist ein von Vögeln bezwitschertes, weiß überrauschtes Pingpongmatch, und die Klarinette seufzt ganz jämmerlich dazu; die Drucker steppen pointillistische Botschaften auf einen dunklen Dröhnfond; die Gitarre schrappt grummelig gegen ein Gewirr von Automatenstimmen an; während der Kaffee durchschmurgel, geht zu melancholischen Gitarrendrones ein Gewitter nieder.


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Review

by Andrea Ferraris in Chain DLK (USA), April 28, 2008 |6440|

Trois songes

It took me a while to review this dvd, but as you can imagine it’s one of those releases you need to “understand” and that needs to be listened to really carefully and ma’am, I swear I did it! Don’t misinterpret me thinking it’s too weird, for even those who are not deeply into contemporary music and into modern electronic compositions can give it a listen quite easily. In some way the music is really close to some ambient pieces, but that’s quite obvious since ambient music has its origin right there in modern classical music. The first composition Ombres espace, silence (2005) offers four movements, the opening is quite soft and evocative and I’d add relaxing, but it’s right with the second section of the work the “music concrete” nature of the effort really makes the difference with the average and becomes explicit: sudden and unexpected sounds will make your heart stop while you were waiting for a gradual tension-building, the third “act” of this “drama” is nothing but crepuscular, but Gobeil while remaining deeply suggestive closes this suite in a soft and oniric way. While the first part of the work is close to something many ambient listener my dig, with Entre les deux rives du printemps (2006) the classical training of Gobeil is much more overt; I’m probably saying something he may disagree with but even if I can’t say exactly why this one reminded me of some late compositions of Steve Reich, just brought to their extreme consequences, not necessarily odd or depressive since the music has its relaxing moments, but when Gobeil goes for creating a “hole in the scene” take for granted you won’t find ground to walk upon. Every once in a while the composer changes suddenly everything by breaking the continuity of music with some really violent and high volume explosions that made me jump on the chair while my headphones blew apart the few neurons I had left. The closing composition is not that far from the previous two in a sense you don’t have to consider this as one of those DVD featuring different works by the same composer where the style is considerably different, this Canadian composer works with a clearly distinguishable method thanks to which the music is homogenous. The sound definition is great, that’s why this label puts out such releases on DVD and obviously I suggest you to give it a try playing it in your home-theater.


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Review

by Ingvar Loco Nordin in Sonoloco Record Reviews (Sweden), April 22, 2008 |6437|

Exils
Annette Vande Gorne has administered Schaeffer’s assets in magnificence, developing her own brilliance out of these tantalizing traditions.”

Annette Vande Gorne (1946, Belgium) studied with Pierre Schaeffer! That’s how deep her roots go. This is becoming more rare as time passes and those legendary maestros of the middle and the latter half of the 20th century travel past us into the future, reborn and lost among the generations, like Stockhausen just recently. In this respect a composer like Vande Gorne serves as a link and a bridge, if not always per se, in her works, so at least in intellectual atmospheres or at the very least in our own tainted perceptions of how things are…

Annette Vande Gorne went through her time of classical studies at the Royal Conservatories at Mons and Brussels in Belgium, but then she was strongly swayed by the works of Pierre Henry and François Bayle, and soon went on to study with Schaeffer at the Conservatoire national supérier in Paris. She founded and managed the studios Musiques & Recherches and the Métamorphoses d’Orphée. She became Professor of Electroacoustic Composition at the Royal Conservatory of Liège in 1986, and then in Brussels 1987 and Mons 1993.

The description of Vande Gorne’s present inclinations probably comes straight from her own desk, so it may be informative to cite from it:

“Her current works focuses on various energetic and kinesthetic archetypes. Nature and the physical world are models for an abstract and expressive musical language. She is passionate about two other fields of research: the various relationships to word, sound and meaning provided by electroacoustic technology, and the composition of space seen as the fifth musical parameter and its relationship to the other four parameters and the archetypes being used […].”

Track 1. Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Est (2003) [7:59]

Debussy peeps into the circumstances and musical motions/emotions of this piece, and the title itself is a slight paraphrase on Debussy’s 7th Prelude from his First Book for Piano; Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest. Annette Vande Gorne says that “Debussy’s highly varied writing and composition techniques find a strong echo in electroacoustic writing techniques and sound processing”! I enjoy observations like this one, finding unexpected connections. Life is full of them, but they’re all too often overlooked. Nothing exists by and of itself; this is a Buddhist insight that needs to be learned. Everything exists in “dependent-arising”, meaning that all things, material and immaterial, depend on causes and conditions. Nothing is stable and solid and eternal, but flowing and fluctuating, disappearing and emerging, all of it: feelings and worlds and thoughts and housing projects. Debussy winking his eye through an electroacoustic piece by Annette Vande Gorne thus feels appropriate! In fact, the art of acousmatique serves well the concept and notion of “dependant-arising”, by its very nature, as it moves indiscriminately through ages and timbres and ambiences, letting all aspects of everything affect and reset everything.

I start listening on the outside of a sphere that holds a dream. I feel my knuckles knocking percussive queries on the even surface, which reflects myself in its funny mirror. The curving soap bubble entity constitutes a center of a hazy circumstance; some back of the mind clarity in a life that mostly holds up front, in the face obscurity. Vande Gorne paints in transparent hues, barely touching upon that illusion which we, habitually, define as “reality”. I think about the make-up of my bones, their intricate, porous structure, and I think about my flesh; organic matter with wriggling passages for blood and oxygen and nutrients. I wonder why this is. Why do I carry this brain on top of this human structure in matter, like a flower that blooms in the spiritual world? As soon as we’re born, we begin our journey towards death. And then it starts over. In the meantime — the mean time! — art is the essence of this process of life and living futility; the mirror into which we may look, and this art of electroacoustics, acousmatique, holds up a rare and wonderful mirror, dealing with “reality” in the most stringent way; by robbing it of its self evidence, unmasking its mystery, revealing the true uncertainty that lies within, at the core of each moment, of each life, of space and time: uncertainty, unreality, illusion, mirrors in mirrors, moment rising out of moment, hallway after hallway of mind and fantastic premonitions and nowhere a fixed point.

Annette Vande Gorne’s first piece begins with uncertain sounds; maybe rain trickling into a tin bucket or absentminded fingers tapping the tight skin of a drum, or boxes with apples rubbing against each other in a stagecoach passing over a cobbled street in 18th century Central Europe…

A sweeping motion that gathers force and content blows in your face like a dust storm on the road to Tucson, the sky turning yellow and ominous — but inside this dusty layer some kind of orchestral timbre hovers, in and out of earshot, elusive, like those sounds you sometimes think you hear (changing latitude now!) inside a snowstorm in Lapland when you’re on your skis, trying to follow the markers to the next hut, not to get lost in the whiteout and the cold; those kind of overtones that hide in storms — or all those colors that shimmer in the concept “white”: that’s how it feels in Vande Gorne’s Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Est. After a little while, you actually sense the bolder framework of a piece of traditional music as dark stretches within the noise; a musical being barely outlined in darker contours in the maze: Debussy staggering against the wind of time? This fades into the atmosphere of an industrial workshop or the sounds of the sea breaking; you chose according to your inclinations! As the progression of sounds turns more elastic and mystical, I hear the foghorn from a lighthouse that gradually changes into a warning signal that transforms into the wind section of an orchestra — and then, like a wondrous hallucination, a trickling piano appears, floating in this sonic space, and a string section, and finally a singer, in a dream or a recollection, somewhere in the circuits of your brain. Annette Vande Gorne has used a lot of precision mechanics building this piece of sound art. On the drone extensions of an orchestral tutti she lets sharp shreds of tinplate audio swarm along, cutting the skin of any sentient being not taking cover; shreds from various periods blown together in the time crusher machine of mind; a rummaging low pressure in the breath of destruction and creation.

In calmer sections the sounds thin out, opening the immediate space around you, where you find yourself in a pen where calves push their runny muzzles into your armpits, while making snorting sounds. It feels comforting in your rural childhood recollections. As tension and volume again rises, angelic choirs straight out of a Doré woodcut or Stockhausen’s Engel-Prozessionen appear, against the light, on the galactic horizon.

Tracks 2 — 6. Vox Alia (1992) [21:22]: Giocoso [5:04] / Amoroso [4:59] / Innocentemente [4:24] / Furioso [4:59] / Parola volante [1:56]

It is apparent already from the title that Vande Gorne works with the human voice in this piece. She calls it “the ancestral medium of all direct communication”. Introducing the five brief studies contained in this composition, the composer says, about Giocoso: “[It] mixes vocal music from every non-European continent with the ‘Western past’; about Amoroso: “[It] attempts […] an ornamental and contrapuntal compositional style using a Gregorian phrase for a template”; about Innocentemente: “[It] rediscovers immediate temporality with its contrasting, elusive nature and the diffuse, internal sense of space of childhood”; about Furioso: “[It] eructates its violence within a linear and directed space with rising, rhythmical, explosive energy”; and about Parola volante: “[It] is a short tribute to Pierre Schaeffer’s revolutionary thinking on sound, […] in a few sentences using Schaeffer’s voice.”

The voices in part 1 are deeply hidden in the electronics, blurred beyond recognition inside a torrent of work-arounds, but the sonic result is very nice as is, even if you have no idea about its origin. One of the wonders of electroacoustics is the possibility you have to hide and/or reveal certain aspects of sound, for example its origin, the way you chose to let some bubbles of methane gas reality blurp up out of the swamp of mushy sonorities or not. However, though I hear a direct and immediate vocalism only once in part 1, Vande Gorne has worked with a conversational touch here and there, indicating some kind of exchange of morphemes.

Part 2 introduces otherworldly aspects of sound, albeit with certain points of reference barely showing, like monks or priests chanting in growling low-passes, while rippling vocals dance in grainy streaks of light up under the ceiling of old European domes, the wobbly sonorities making you speculate about sunken worlds; an Atlantis of acousmatique, fish with round mouths looking ridiculously surprised as Christianity wells over the world like a pandemia.

Part 3 pours a bucket of daycare centre commotion over your perception like cubes of ice; such is the sudden effect of this unexpected taste of “reality”! This flurry of children’s voices are, however, soon sucked up in a hallucinatory whirlwind; a fever dream that lifts you in a spiral over into a neighboring reality, just as unreal as the already accepted reality you came from. It’s such an electroacoustic pleasure to lose yourself in Annette Vande Gorne’s multi-dimensional sound journeys! Discovering the alien properties of all you take for granted is a great exploration, any way you see it. Stockhausen was wonderful with this in his electronic music, and Vande Gorne also travels those explorative realms, looking back at Earth through inter-galactic eons of meditation. The jolly scream of a little child is turned into a beautiful, high-pitch drone that lets you take a giant leap into the dream world of life and death flickering. You’re stepping into a room where the Star Maker sits at a table, rearranging space and time. You hope you’re not intruding.

Part 4 hits suddenly from the outset, fizzling and sputtering like electricity through water; a sense of an engine gearing up, the whole situation turning fiercer — a model airplane rising through childhood; an inter-continental missile rising through worn-out civilizations, rage rising through the throat of the Star Maker at all this evil that we harbor; all these shiny jet fighters that we build from soil and rock. The piece recedes into the meditation of khoomei singing; a long, thin line losing itself in the haze of the distance.

Part 5, the final part of Vox Alia, is the most charming permutation of Pierre Schaeffer’s voice, which is also allowed its naturalistic place in the room in brief sequences, in and out of vision; a portion of the past blooming in the present, hurried off into the future.

Track 7. Fragments de lettre à un habitant du Centre (2002) [12:13]
Kamal Ben Hameda [text]

The composer defines this work as “the image of Western urban civilization as seen through the eyes of an immigrant Arab poet.” She also talks about fragments of the inner being and fractures from our childhood, brought forth as we travel into a future that turns into past without us even noticing.

Here Vande Gorne works in a vein familiar to me, traditional in a way, in a French/Swedish way, since the art of sound poetry — which this is an example of — has been most successful in these European countries since the Sixties. I only catch part of the meaning of the text, since my French isn’t the best, but I enjoy immensely Vande Gorne’s way of distributing this storm of words with their surrounding hellfire sonorities, this trembling, rumbling jet-stream and earthquake shakedown, in which the poems get ample expression space, their inherent atmospheric seeds sprouting wildly through the cracks of poetic time.

Then, all of a sudden a break: silence, halting-places of the breath… out of which the voice steps alone, like a person emerging from a burning building, clothed in nothing but words… until the motion of the ambience tightens and sweeps the voice and all of its words away, away, up and away…

Sometimes the poems, loud and clear, appear in the complete presence of an anechoic chamber crammed with turbulent permutations; shadows of these poems; grotesque, disfigured, chopped up and thrown in the air like the rice at a wedding.

Vande Gorne applies various spatial stunts, luring you deeper into the smoky after-burn of linguistic sense. Wonderful!

Track 8. Exil, chant II (1983, 2006) [22:34]
Saint-John Perse [text]

The woman shouts to a neighbor, like she would in an old Fellini film, standing out on the lawn behind the house, hanging white sheets up to dry in the wind, but her shouts are accompanied by an immediate sonic shadow of her vocals, like time itself was slightly out of joint, or as if invisible cracks opened up in space; crevasses of existence, leading nowhere.

This was just a fanfare of sorts, a vocal fanfare in a cloth-line saga, to open the story, because what follows is beautifully instrumental, on dark flutes of various timbres, swung through ring-modulators (it seems), taking on sweet, romantic, melancholy semi-melodies of 19th century Swedish Dalecarlia, the bee swarm elasticity of the ring modulation rendering the electroacoustic strangeness; the sonorous alienation in which to dream strange dreams.

The poetry is introduced in a female voice, subdued and muffled, into the wobbling, meandering fragility of line, held in approximate equilibrium by one clean flute-like extension and one extremely elastic ring-modulated tone, moving simultaneously in the same direction down the duration. The music is heavenly here, unbelievably beautiful and truly mystical. The female voice expressing the poetic phrases is divided into several sister voices, appearing at various points in space.

A flock of geese suddenly takes over the main frame, while other birds — even one bird of pray circling on high; a buzzard — are heard; a wild duck speaking in his harsh language up close, expecting bread crumbs from passers-by. Children clothed in colorful rain clothes are also discovered playing in this crazy Photoshop bird land. Eventually Vande Gorne makes more of this than the analogue birds are capable of by themselves. As most of these sounds diminish and cease, and a new sound of close breathing appears, only the sharp and wild call of the buzzard recurs with long pauses in between, as the woman again begins to recite Saint-John Perse’s poems. The composer uses some light sound poetic permutations along the way, making for a truly exciting listening experience; the spatial parameters of the art amply applied.

Frictional disturbances crack through the area; water gushes in over the shore, the poem is cut up and distributed at very close range, up your nose, into your ears, invasive, until it finally leaves you with nothing but assorted vowels, like forlorn lingual building blocks swept up on the beach, after a war.

Some time later all hell breaks loose, when the poems are screamed and shouted by wild-eyed women standing with their feet in the water on the shore, invoking the deities of the ocean while ducks quack and the buzzard again rises above the scene, as electricity fizzles and frizzles through the land, water seeping in and out of cracks of skulls in the waterline. Finally the presence of a silent poem permeates the atmosphere with a fairyland ambience, beyond the Grimm Brothers as well as Brian Eno. Fabulous sound art!

Track 9. Crise (1983) [5:27]

Annette Vande Gorne tries to express “various states of madness” in this piece. How is she doing? Quite well, and in an amusing way too! She begins the work in a mad rush of bubbly spheres falling down a curving roller coaster track, for a while there mimicking some early Morton Subotnick and John Chowning, shortly letting her lust for shortwave interferences take severe hold! I can picture her in front of the radio set, the shortwave receiver, turning the station dial as fast as she can across the frequencies, achieving this crazy, bubbly, crackling noise of the world. I did it myself in the 1950s, establishing my lust for electroacoustic music — even though I didn’t know it then! You feel like your traveling the atomic jitter inside matter in this music, boring through the true state of granite and gneiss! Towards the end of this short work the waveband audio seems to originate in the electro-magnetic force fields around the planets of our solar system, the way NASA’s Voyager I & II recorded them, and with a smidgen of Vande Gorne’s earthly percussion, this madhouse incident draws to a close way down a lonely corridor of oblivion…

Tracks 10 — 16. Figures d’espace (2004) [13:49]: Vide et Plein [1:21] / Texture [2:19] / Ritournelle 1 [0:38] / Vagues [3:29] / Ritournelle 2 [0:51] / Contrastes [4:23] / Ritournelle 3

“What does ‘space’ mean?”, the composer asks, and possibly aims at a sonic reply in this 7-part work.

Strong, bouncing, trembling seasick sounds begin the piece, like wine glasses on a table hitting against each other as a tremor passes through rock bottom. The sounds, full of pleasure, shoot out like rays of light through cut glass, moving in winding paths through the irregular density of the crystal. These light-sounds are very close; you’re almost backing up a bit; that close! A common falling trajectory suggests a red shift of celestial bodies or a sense of a down-curving situation of a private nature. Percussive and sizzling ingredients move beautifully against a backdrop of extended, soaring atmospheres. The way these sounds — some of them — hover like dragonflies; one second still, the next shooting off, really charms me; has me listening attentively. Vande Gorne doesn’t hesitate to bring in the tolling of church bells and flies passing close by the microphones (like Pink Floyd on Ummagumma!) — and she fits it all into this work of art, sort of effortlessly, not missing out the slightest, very cleverly.

The falling trajectory garden sensation keeps on keeping on, masterly, but now combining high-pitch, shrill layers with deep, murmuring ones. I even had to open the window to see if it was on the DVD or came from a truck outside! It was the DVD! A full nocturnal summer ambience fills the atmosphere with insects that tremble and shiver with brief life under the stars. My senses get confused. Am I experiencing rapid movement or a complete standstill? If you meet someone in space, who is moving? You decide; it’s all about points of reference. Vande Gorne spreads delicate, semi-transparent layers of grainy courses of events, like the rings of Saturn, giving off these indefinable grey sonorities with trillions of tiny reflections pinching your perception.

Bouncing springs and metallic percussive sounds twang and jolt at close range, all but hypnotizing me with their brilliance and magic beauty. Sounds can be so utterly persuasive! The way the afterglow of percussive attacks in this work keep bending and curving constitute some of the most pleasurable sounds imaginable!

The sudden blow of a train whistle startles me, and the steam engine then starting up brings a good portion of anachronism into the picture. The rhythm of the rail soon disappears in downright spacey sonorities; the way Olaf Stapledon may have experienced them on his alleged space-and-time travels in the 1930s. A flock of birds scare easily and flap madly to rise out of their forest meadow. Crackling fireworks open other aspects of civilization, as does passing traffic. I’d say that these last regions of this DVD certainly celebrate Pierre Schaeffer and his new thinking in the late 1940s well, and yes, Annette Vande Gorne has administered Schaeffer’s assets in magnificence, developing her own brilliance out of these tantalizing traditions.


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Review

by Dolf Mulder in Vital #622 (The Netherlands), April 8, 2008 |3527|

Musique pour objets en voie de disparition
“This way she has built nice impressionistic, soundscaping pieces.”

Two veterans from the Montréal music scene present their newest work. For her new project Diane Labrosse invited the following musicians: Marie-Soleil Bélanger (violin), Jean Derome (flute, fake trumpet), Bernard Falaise (electric guitar), Lori Freedman (clarinet), Jean René (viola), Pierre Tanguay (percussion). Labrosse herself plays accordion. It is a sort of concept album. In 8 compositions she makes use of concrete noises we all know from our daily lives: clocks, telephones, printers, answering machines, etc. Without any manipulation these sounds are integrated in a musical background, by which she tries to evoke a story and atmosphere around these sounds. One could call it a non verbal radioplay, a sonic story that in a way moves along a narrative line. In each composition we hear only one or few musicians. We never hear an ensemble playing. “This disc was entirely assembled without the consent of the musicians playing on it. I thank them for agreeing to record ‘blindfolded’ and let me manipulate them as I pleased” Labrosse explains. So these compositions are probably the result of a lot of editing, etc. This way she has built nice impressionistic, soundscaping pieces. They are carefully structured, with a good feeling for balance and atmosphere.


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Critique

by Grisli in Le son du grisli (France), April 7, 2008 |6422|

Environs
“Au final, si les intentions et les propositions changent, reste un travail précis sur le son, bientôt fait matière, qui impressionne encore davantage au moment de s’évanouir, une fois qu’elle se sera insinuée partout.”

Compositeur reconnu et souvent récompensé de musique électroacoustique, l’Anglais Jonty Harrison assemble sur Environs trois compositions partagées entre mouvement et statisme.

Ode peu banale aux éléments, le disque renferme ainsi les restes sonores et réinventés d’une plongée aquatique (Undertow), une traînée de parasites alertes (Rock’n’Roll), et d’étranges récupérations sonores: bruits d’automobiles et leurs effets sur le paysage (Internal Combustion), atmosphère enregistrée d’un jardin de banlieue en été (Afterthoughts).

Au final, si les intentions et les propositions changent, reste un travail précis sur le son, bientôt fait matière, qui impressionne encore davantage au moment de s’évanouir, une fois qu’elle se sera insinuée partout.


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Review

by Ingvar Loco Nordin in Sonoloco Record Reviews (Sweden), April 3, 2008 |6432|

Miroirs obscurs
“…if you hear this as a catalogue of sounding motion and motion in sound, you have a masterwork — and all the other works on here are brilliant artistic expressions, such as rarely heard.”

Andrew Lewis (1963) read music at the University of Birmingham, UK, from 1981—84. He went on to study composition with Jonty Harrison, receiving his doctorate in 1991. Since he was in place in Birmingham during the formation of BEAST — The Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre — it is no wonder that he was one of the original members. Although his output is predominantly acousmatic, he also composes for conventional, or should I say classic, setups, like chamber groups, orchestras and vocalists. Andrew Lewis is a professor at Bangor University in Wales since 1993, as well as the Director of their Electroacoustic Music Studios.

Most of the music on this audio DVD is fresh and new, from 2002 to 2007, with the exception of one work from 1999.

Track 1. Penmon Point (2002—03) [15:26] To Maurice Lock.

Andrew Lewis has written a poetic text on location at Penmon Point, Wales, in December 2001, dedicated to Maurice Lock, which is included in the liner notes of this piece on Lewis’ website:

“A cold, clear Advent day. In the distance, snow-capped mountains appear still and at peace, yet close by the sea relentlessly pounds the Point on three sides. The steep pebble beach is drawn by waves that crackle and seethe with the mass of moving stone, while frozen pools on the shore splinter and craze in joyful counterpoint. Half a mile distant an island rises up, almost touchable — Seiriol’s island, home of the hermit, now lifeless yet still echoing with ancient worship. Even the lighthouse, beacon of guidance, tolls in ceaseless praise, as if to continue the songs of men who now sing before God.”

Lewis explains that his piece merges three aspects of this place, which he claims holds extraordinary sights and sounds: Musica Mundana, which defines “the ceramic, roaring scintillation of the waves” over the pebbles with “the splintering of ice, the cries of birds and the acoustic ambience”; Musica Humana, represented by the Priory Church, here exemplified by the 7th century plainchant hymn Conditor Alme Siderum, and Musica Instrumentalis, in which Lewis allots the lighthouse and its bell an instrumental role, which has already been done very successfully before, by Alvin Curran in his wonderful suite of pieces called Maritime Rites, in which he, among other sound sources, uses the foghorn of the lighthouse Portland Head in Maine. Lewis points out the periodicity of all three aspects of this geographic place in Wales, such as “the ebb and flow of the waves, the rise and fall of voices and [the] regular tolling of the bell”.

The first thing that strikes me is how cleverly the real breaks into the unreal, and the other way around, as when the swell of the sea grows into and through a clearly artificial standing wave of white noise, claiming its real rights in un unreal world. This happens gradually when it happens, in a way that gives you a chance to switch, time unit by time unit, back and forth between natural and artificial, or from artificial to natural, also getting a taste of the similarity between what is and what isn’t: it’s almost the same!

The second thing that strikes me becomes more obvious the more I listen to Andrew Lewis’ music: the elegance and sophistication. Much of his music shines like hardwood and polished metal — or like the brittle and fragile, light vulnerability of soap bubbles or Christmas tree balls. I’m usually not very fond of too polished electroacoustics, but it’s a bit different in the case of Andrew Lewis. He has a way of spraying grainy properties across the evenness of the elegance, allowing for disparate and thorny qualities in the interface of elegance and crudeness. This is part of his compositional secret, saving him from the hell of too tidy, neat and clean audio!

The Penmon Point piece falls right in line with my sentiments above. It has the clarity and purity and chastity of an impenetrable sphere of stubborn innocence floating in a space of sin and guilt, but its vicinity is full of wild dreams that cannot be tamed, far beyond the concept of righteousness and iniquity. Soon the air is permeated with clouds of irregular fragments of the future, and chanting priests are barely detected from a vague, indefinite place in the room. Their voices merge with the electroacoustic filtering which mixes the properties of human voices and the metallic ringing of bells — until a cruder and more straightforward ambience suddenly wakes you up like rain on your face when you’ve fallen asleep in a meadow on a warm summer day. Reality can be stunning.

The sea rolls in, thunders over the cliffs, and seagulls call out in the salty air, in a recollection rolled up in the 11 dimensions of the binaries of this disc. A star crushing thunder swells, carrying sharp and smooth audio, high and low pitches, far and wide and closed and crowded, in a jingling, soaring, wheezing, bubbling and chanting maze that slowly dissipates in a semi-transparent mist of sounds, through which more solid blocks of audibilities tumble like cubes of ice and dices, in a magnificence of a mudflow of the entirety of the moment; sounds brought forth by gravity and friction and an enormous release of pressure.

In the following stillness: a tingling sensation and the inward chanting of monks, but only as a brief, temporary deviation from the constant rumble of a tumbling sea at Penmon Point and the ocean of time in eternity.

Track 2. Llanddwyn Skies (2003) [14:49] To Christian Calon

The composer says he tried to “capture the solitude and stillness of dawn in Newborough Forest and […] Llanddwyn Island”. He felt that there was a perfect equilibrium at the time and place ‘tween “day/night, sun/moon, sea/sky, birds/planes…” Lewis masters the art of ecoacoustics in electroacoustics better than anyone I’ve heard before, even though some composers set out to specifically do ecoacoustic recordings. Andrew Lewis manages to wave a tapestry of the nature of synthetics with the nature of the naturalistic, enhancing both aspects. I say ‘aspects’, because the synthetic as well as the naturalistic exist in our universe, and are, by virtue of that, in fact both very much natural. It is just in a sphere of limited awareness that one can distinctly separate the one from the other. Everything is. In Andrew Lewis compositions everything is. It’s marvelous!

With a crawling, twisting motion in space, Llanddwyn Skies extends down the duration, forcefully and mighty at first, in the manner of a huge bell being struck, where after the sound slowly, very slowly dissipates — but in Lewis’ sound burst, a mass of sounds of many origins explode gradually like slow light out of a prism across a white table cloth. When the sounds have almost dissolved from space into time, another world is uncovered, discovered, recovered; a world which stays to itself, making no fuzz, not trying any publicity pranks; just existing in the back of everything: a sunny meadow, surrounded by a coniferous forest, songbirds twittering in an absentminded moment in the sun, crows arguing as they flap clumsily between treetops, moss on ice-age rocks, ants hauling pine needles to their hill. Jetliners streak through the timeframe like somebody stepping out of an oil painting in a gallery, joining the visitors, paint dripping, like blood from a gun shot victim entering the ER. Narrow-minded messages are drawn across heaven by glossy fuselages from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the scraping sound sawing through the bold pates of old-timers who care none about a melting icecap.

Suddenly an ice castle appears out of the air right in front of you, like a sobering hallucination, and you know not where to turn inside your musical dream. The scenery changes faster than the ice can melt or your opinions might change, while somewhere inside a memory, birds chirp. Marsh fluid gases bubble up your throat like methane burps. The motion is an outward one, away from the centre, facing the stars. Out of nothing: something. Out of something: everything. Out of everything: not much. And most of it all faces the other way, in this turned-away world, as you hear your body breathe inside this music, while passenger jets force themselves from one horizon to the next.

Track 3. Benllech Shells (2003) [8:33] To Esme.

Andrew Lewis begins his introduction of this piece with a remark that is very interesting, since it sort of shows what electroacoustics is all about — or almost all about! -, by referring to an experience that we all have; that of putting a sea shell or some other hollow object to our ear, observing the change in ambience, which fuels our auditive imagination, too, with the consensus that we hear the sea in the shell. This is quite wonderful, since it explains so much about this art form and about how much our own imagination fuels it. Lewis also says that his work Benllech Shells “employs computer technology to much the same end, lending an extraordinary aspect to ordinary and familiar sounds; those of a crowdy beach in high summer”.

The music begins with the extremely clean, coppery sound of a percussive attack, which extends elastically, swelling, like fluid from a toppled glass across an oilcloth that exaggerates the surface tension. The sounds are tremendously filling, to your ears what thick, dark chocolate or whole, hardboiled eggs are to your mouth. Thus the music is also bursting at its seams with sparkling and roaring energy.

When the sounds of this beach that floats in a bubble in our recollection gradually emerges between our ears (if heard through earphones) or perfectly panned out around our listening space (in a nicely furnished room with giant speakers and a surround system), clothed in bird song and the happy sounds of playing children (behind the filter of electroacoustic time!), they come with a slight tint of dreaminess, of nose tip hypnosis, rendering them that extra glow that we often overlook when the time is here and the place is now! Maybe hereby we, the listeners and the dreamers, get closer to that elusive state we call reality? Perhaps, by putting this shell to our ear, we understand the makeup and the significance of the ocean and the concept of ocean better? I’m sure art puts as right online with the center of ourselves, which is the center of everything, and which is situated everywhere! All times are now! All places are here!

Lewis shows a cunning wizardry when it comes to mixing the so-called reality with the so-called unreality (which both are just as unreal or real, really!) — and keeping things clean in the process. His sounds are so very beautiful, even through complex processes and extremely delicate and complicated mixes. This is unusual, to this extreme extent. Nothing ever blurs! The slightest smidgen of sound is clean and clear and shiny, even when a gull flies by at close range, calling out in its shrill and scraping voice inside an enormous soundscape of electroacoustics that has just built up like a thunderhead full of meteorological violence and the fatal approach of razor-sharp hail. Impressing! I’m also surprised at the ease with which the composer seems to handle children’s voices when he swings them around in serpentines that bring with them so much of a fairytale ambience that you almost feel like a soaring Peter Pan yourself. Magic! This shows what a master of the art can do with the best tools available. This fairly short piece is one of the most beautiful electroacoustic works I’ve heard.

Track 4. Cable Bay (1998 — 99) [10:04] To Francis Dhomont.

It is revealed that this piece is inspired by the North Wales seascape, and the sea sounds are recorded at a location called Cable Bay.

Lewis opens this piece too with a glary, clean bang, albeit a shade more muffled — and then he rattles jewelry like the Royals did for John Lennon. This tinkling jewelry percussion spreads its crystal daylight all through the thudding, flowing and extending sonorities, like melting water of spring finding its way through sand and gravel. It’s a miniature world of grains of sand, and a star spangled world of galaxies standing in space. Sometimes I hear the tutti of a starry orchestra hiding behind interstellar clouds of dust and gas, its sonic light illuminating the Veil of Maya — while on Earth the midday thaw of an April day drops into a bucket with an erratic but inevitable rhythm. This is a life of non-local connections. Andrew Lewis’ music tells this tale, as wave upon wave move over the sand of the shore, withdrawing and recurring, while the ringed plover and the little ringed plover move nervously back and forth close by…

Tracks 5 — 13. Danses acousmatiques (2007) [35:45]: Section 1: Vacuum (la scène vide); Danse des coups (solo); Shoal / Section 2: Torquetum (pas de cinq); Danse atomique (pas de deux); Flock (pas d’action); / Section 3: Swarm; Nebulum; Danse des gestes (pas de trois)

The composer deliberates on the aspect of spatialization in acousmatic music, and observes that this property not always receives the attention it’s worth, but oftentimes merely appears as an effect. I might insert that one composer dealt feverishly with spatialization; Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was always hugely interesting to listen to him talk about this aspect of music and have him give sounding examples from his own compositions. Anyhow, Andrew Lewis wrote his Danses acousmatiques “in response to this state of affairs”, where “Danses acousmatiques represents a quest for creative, musically significant and ‘perceptible’ use of the spatial aspect of acousmatic music”. The music, in the form of a suite with nine movements divided into three main parts, moves “from the atomic to the cosmic”. Section 1 deals with “stars, planets, the music of the spheres”, section 2 with “the natural world, especially emergent flocking behaviors”, while Section 3 works with “the human world — dance and choreographic movement”.

After hearing these 35 minutes straight through, I can attest to the fact that this work, although being the longest and maybe — probably — the most worked-through on this audio DVD, is not the most artistically significant at all. It is amazing and astounding, yes, hilarious, by virtue of the insane motion of sound, the vanishing and appearing, the exploding, the imploding, the panning and the madly panning, the circulations and the spiralings, the meanderings and the slurping away, the cascading and the merging, the diminishing and the swelling, the contracting and the expanding, the thudding and the slithering — wow! Even though the sounds are just as clean and shiny and brilliant as in his other works here, the artistic aspect, which has rendered Andrew Lewis a lot of credit on the other tracks, lacks on Danses acousmatiques. This work becomes a catalogue composition, exemplifying all the various possibilities of motion and space in sound, and as such, it is fantastic, perhaps groundbreaking! I feel, though, that the composer also wanted to express his artistic vision, but in that case this particular work is lost in the cataloging… This doesn’t matter, though, because if you hear this as a catalogue of sounding motion and motion in sound, you have a masterwork — and all the other works on here are brilliant artistic expressions, such as rarely heard.


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En bref

in Mouvement #47 (France), April 1, 2008 |6433|

Horizons du silence
“Au travers de ces pièces […] transparaît un remarquable sens de l’espace, rehaussé d’un appréciable sens de la narration…”

Repère important dans le domaine des musiques électroacoustiques, le label québécois empreintes DIGITALes a comme particularité de publier — depuis 2005 — ses disques sous forme de DVD-Audio afin de leur faire bénéficier d’une qualité sonore optimale. Ce parti pris trouve sa pleine justification avec l’album Horizons du silence, qui regroupe six pièces du jeune compositeur Martin Leclerc et dénote une approche très cinématographique du matériau sonore. Au travers de ces pièces aux recoins multiples, fourmillant de détails (voix, instruments et autres bruits) et de trouvailles, transparaît un remarquable sens de l’espace, rehaussé d’un appréciable sens de la narration et d’un moins appréciable sens de l’humour.


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Review

by Honker in Terz (Germany), April 1, 2008 |6428|

Mâts
“Jede Sekunde geschieht die Verwandlung. Sagenhaft.”

Dass es eine Frau ist, welche die derzeit lebendigste und intelligenteste Elektroakustik macht, muss man nicht erwähnen, kann man aber. Genauso wie ich die konzeptionelle Klarheit und spontane Lebendigkeit von Kaffe Matthews schätze, frage ich mich, warum es doch immer wieder Frauen sind, die den musikalischen Platzhirsch einfach nicht brauchen und sich im Hier und Jetzt ganz konkret und sinnlich auf die Töne konzentrieren können. Justel hat genug Erfahrung und Meriten, sie ist ein wahres Avantgarde-As — aber es ist vor allem die direkte, lebendige und unprätentiöse Vermittlung ihrer Musik, die sie auszeichnet. Die 8 Stücke von 1996 bis 2004 loten Gegensätze durch temporäre Verbindungen aus, die in ihrer Unberechenbarkeit zunehmend kräftiger und stabiler werden. Tiefe, Oberfläche, Struktur, Freiheit, Impuls, Intelligenz. Die Stücke haben Historie und Tiefe, aber es braucht sie nicht für die aktuelle Transformation, das aktive Hören in der Gegenwart. Jede Sekunde geschieht die Verwandlung. Sagenhaft.


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Critique

by Fabien in Liability Webzine (France), April 1, 2008 |6423|

Geisteswissenschaften
Geisteswissenschaften laisse son auditeur toujours en éveil. Jamais il ne sera en situation de confort et devra être attentif à cette révolution permanente, aux changements de couleurs, de rythmes et, finalement, de direction.”

Depuis qu’on l’avait rencontré au sein de Morceaux_De_Machines, A_Dontigny était resté assez discret. Du moins pour nous. Aujourd’hui c’est son premier album en solitaire qui paraît et force est de constater qu’en deux ans l’homme n’a rien perdu de ses talents de manipulateur sonore. Déjà habitué à travailler avec Paul Dolden, Diane Labrosse (qui était déjà présente sur l’album de Morceaux_De_Machines) et Jon Vaughn c’est tout naturellement qu’on les retrouve ici, maltraitant la matière en ne se donnant aucune limite. Ainsi entre efforts électroacoustiques, sampling, explorations synthétiques et digressions guitaristiques A_Dontigny et ses camarades nous offrent une leçon de déstructuration musicale du plus bel effet. Certes, il n’est pas toujours facile de les suivre mais malgré la difficulté de l’œuvre on reste attiré par ce disque intransigeant et fort bien produit. Dans tout ce magma, où le contre-pied musical est roi, il y a une certaine forme de clarté qui émerge mettant en exergue une volonté tenace de ne respecter aucun code. On n’entendra alors ici aucune cohérence dans l’approche structurelle des morceaux mais c’est aussi ce qui fait sa force et sa capacité à surprendre.

Ainsi Geisteswissenschaften laisse son auditeur toujours en éveil. Jamais il ne sera en situation de confort et devra être attentif à cette révolution permanente, aux changements de couleurs, de rythmes et, finalement, de direction. A_Dontigny (Aimé pour les intimes), aurait pu jouer l’outrance et le grand n’importe quoi pourvu que le trouble soit jeté. Au contraire on sent dans Geisteswissenschaften, malgré l’absence de règles, une tentative de ne pas sombrer dans un chaos total. Dans son apparente anarchie ce disque est bien plus subtil qu’il n’y paraît et dénote une liberté totale dans la manière d’aborder la musique, de la modeler et de lui donner un sens. Écouter ce disque n’est pas aussi surhumain que cela. Il suffit juste de porter sa curiosité un peu au-delà de ses habitudes et de l’ouvrir gracieusement à cette vision musicale hors normes.


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Recensione

by Stefano Bianchi in Blow Up #119 (Italy), April 1, 2008 |3524|

Musique pour objets en voie de disparition
Diane Labrosse ha avuto un’idea simpatica, originale, delicata, tenerissima. Creare una “musica per oggetti che stanno per scomparire”: otto tracce dedicate a sveglia, moka, registratore a nastro…”

Diane Labrosse ha avuto un’idea simpatica, originale, delicata, tenerissima. Creare una “musica per oggetti che stanno per scomparire”: otto tracce dedicate a sveglia, moka, registratore a nastro, telefono analogico, TV in bianco e nero, stampante, segreteria telefonica, calcolatore elettrico. Come portare a termine la missione? Registrando i rispettivi suoni-rumori e musicandoli assieme a un ensemble di sei esperti musicisti come Marie-Soleil Bélanger (violino), Jean Derome (flauto e trombetta vocale), Bernard Falaise (chitarra elettrica), Lori Freedman (clarinetto), Jean René (viola) e Pierre Tanguay (percussioni); per sé Diane riserva la fisarmonica. La connessione diretta tra le musiche proposte e i rumori ad esse connessi sfugge (al di là della malinconia di fondo di tutti i pezzi) ma non è ovviamente questo il punto. Tutto ruota infatti intorno ai suoni messi in campo, sempre semplici e nudi di fronte al doloroso annaspare degli oggetti morenti: un metronomico battito di corde (Le réveille-matin à tic-tac, Le magnétophone à ruban), un violino colmo di nostalgia (Le moulin à café manuel, splendida), il melodrammatico incombere di soffi di fisarmonica (Le téléphone à cadran rotatif), il disperato urlo del clarinetto nel mezzo di un caos primordiale (La télé noir et blanc), il flauto che galleggia tra le compressioni ritmiche di una formidabile progressione minimal techno (L’imprimante), l’abile goffo rigurgitare delle note basse di una chitarra (Le répondeur à cassettes), la viola e la fisarmonica che stendono un telo ambient avvolgendo il brulicare di una calcolatrice (Le percolateur électrique). Spesso, tra i pezzi, lo squillo di una sveglia che avverte “memento mori” ai trapassandi. Struggente. (8/10)


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Review

by Seth Watter in Signal to Noise #49 (USA), April 1, 2008 |3495|


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Never seperates text from context: Vande Gorne uses the human voice as an orchestra.

by Tobias Fischer in Tokafi (Germany), March 30, 2008 |6430|

Exils
“Quite obviously, then, we are dealing with a highly personal form of expression here, which has found its place in between the arts of poetry and music.”

While writing an article on “The Art of Sounds”, a recent documentary on Pierre Henry, I was once again impressed by the power of ballet. Through the symbiosis of sound and dance, the idiosyncratic noises of the French pioneer were suddenly transcended into very concrete, unashamedly emotional, immediately physical and occasionaly even sexual movements. In short, into something a wide audience could relate to. Annette Vande Gorne, whose contact with Henry proved to be pivotal in her development as an artist, makes use of the same mechanism by integrating human voice and speech into her music.

I should actually specify that by saying that Vande Gorne’s music uses the human voice as an orchestra and carefully places spoken word contributions into the texture of compositions with a strong spatial component. In her œuvre, the word comes first and everything else follows in its wake — rather than the other way round. For better judgement’s sake, too, one should replace the term composition with a comparison to radio plays and audio books, subtracting logical causality and adding timbral transfomations, colourful abstractions and surprising juxtapositions.

Quite obviously, then, we are dealing with a highly personal form of expression here, which has found its place in between the arts of poetry and music. A poem by Saint-John Perse is the backbone to the 22-minute wordscape Exil, chant II. Snippets from the lyrics are presented against a fluent backdrop of digital squealing, tortured frequencies, processed sounds of nature as well as pure field recordings of waves breaking against cliffs and bird song. Fragments de lettre à un habitant du Centre leaves aside all concrete references, providing only a touchwood of textural metaphors through which the voice of Éveline Legrand struggles in vain in search for a centre, a focal point and a conclusion.

Vande Gorne never seperates text from context. Her utmost desire seems to be a state in which what is written is transformed into an autarcic world in the very moment it is uttered. In Fragments, this means that every second of the piece is built from samples of the original lecture, with Legrand’s narrative firmly in the limelight. Text, reader and music are inseperably connected. Each version of the piece creats itself entirely from scratch through the parameters of vocal delivery, influencing not only the interpretation of the poem, but also the music accompanying it.

Just as Henry did with patterns of dance, she arrives at a space where several senses are addressed at the same time — and where their interaction awards them a more universal and accesible quality. Through this technique, Vande Gorne is capable of inferring a dadaistic kind of meaning in places where there would otherwhise be nothing but feeling one’s way forward in the dark. She is not making a definite point, though. Rather, vocals in her pieces are like candles, which provide a welcome sense of security in a terrain which often appears alien and impenetrable. What lies beyond their glow, however, is anybody’s guess.


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Review

by Ingvar Loco Nordin in Sonoloco Record Reviews (Sweden), March 25, 2008 |6420|

Les ponts de l’espace
“Yes, visions supersede each other when you let Laurie Radford’s music take hold, not without pleasure!”

Laurie Radford (1958) is a new name to me, bur probably just because of my ignorance. Now I get the chance to become acquainted with his sound art on this Audio DVD from empreintes DIGITALes; a label which not only is the foremost label for electroacoustic music, with its own distinct style, but which also is one of the most prolific labels in the genre, with a host of new Audio DVDs and the occasional CD out this winter and spring.

Radford works in a diverse compositional realm, with various combinations of instruments and voices, electroacoustics, and performers interacting with computer-controlled signal processing. He is currently teaching electroacoustic music and composition at London’s City University, UK.

Track 1. Verb Tales

(2002) [5:01]The composer explains that the origin of this brief piece were the reverberant tails of a variety of vocal recordings. The start of the recording, though, to me, resembles a group of Tibetan lures, sounding fervently out of the pre-oppression days of the Potala, through the clear air of the high plateau. Synchronicity has it that I hear these cumulating Tibetan trumpets as I get a email urging me to sign a petition for the Tibetan people and the plight of the Dalai Lama, which I do — giving Laurie Radford’s first piece on the DVD a deeper significance.

Wheezing, appearing and disintegrating sounds move in between the trumpet congestions that hammer gold through the chilly moments of high altitudes. At times I do also recognize the faint connection with words; thus verbs, but that is really very distantly associated. Longer, droning, but sort of slowly swelling sonorities, shape a sonic elasticity beneath the tack-hammering gold trumpets. Original!

Tracks 2 — 7. les ponts de l’espace I (2001) [7:14]: line I / triangle / point I / circle / point II / line II

The composer explains that the short pieces each are miniature studies of two compositional processes. In each piece Radford explores spatial sound motions within geometrical shapes, which explains the titles. These are also studies of environmental recordings integrated with sounds from the studio. More explicitly, some of the sounds derive from an instrument built by Tom Nunn, called Primordium. These sounds are set up to form relationships with unprocessed takes on a wintry urban streetscape.

As I start to listen I get a sense of reality flushing through a number of quantum dimensions; situations, one after the other, for the current situation, for the swirling pattern of cars and birds and human anatomies down the mystery of space and time and whatever else is deciding our elusive lucidity in the dubious state of matter, which Michio Kaku in his spellbinding scientific TV programs have me marvel at, while I realize that anything that shows up in front of me, from coffee cups to galaxies, are mere patterns in space.

Laurie Radford’s investigations of moving sound placed in geometrical situations further enhances my ever deeper identification with all and ever, in an existence of non-local connections and vibrating patterns that can make sense and no sense of everything.

The sounds in a musical consideration are exciting and beautiful as well. You can listen without getting into philosophy and physics, and evolution is fast and charmingly witty in these flurries of spiraling grains and lofty passages through parks and across pedestrian crossings, as the wind carries children’s voices and spectacular, rustling and punching events are mirrored in mirror turning and tumbling through the void between time and space, between here and now.

Tracks 8 — 13. les ponts de l’espace II (2003) [12:01]: point I / triangle / line I / grainDrone / line II / circle+point

Laurie Radford continues his investigations of raw environmentals and studio produced sonorities. Some of the concrete sounds are brought in from a gallery opening in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and from a traditional bell ringing in Bresovica, also in Slovenia. He also brings back some of the electroacoustic sounds from a choice of his own earlier mixed compositions.

This set begins with a truly elegant twitch; a tilted hat over half-hidden, smiling eyes and teeth glaring like white pearls out of the composer’s grin. Coin-twisting sounds at hilarious rotations breeze by and up, out into space, while other sounding motions crash down well within earshot. Lots of patterns exchange information about position, density, inertia and so forth, all inside a realm of style and grace! This is music made from creep-resisting alloy.

Applause splash in like rain, or rain spreads like applause across the bleachers. Sharp, extremely close steel insect sounds move knifing antennae. Eleven dimensions of curly candy sonorities hide behind traditional ways of thinking. Right in a placement of dispersed squirts, people make themselves known through voices. Shadowy realities flutter by in wind instruments and shreds of ambient spaces; quite peculiar — and too much, really, to put your finger on. As soon as you stretch your finger to pinpoint something in this music, something else is there, which might not even be remotely related. This music calls for a kind of up-scaled acceptance that isn’t common. Squirts in buckets — perhaps a cow being milked — is mixed with a child happily and playfully calling Mommy, and spiraling, tight electronic ribbons turn through younger years. A jolly market place accordion is cut up like sound poetry, and you almost feel the wind coming down off the mountain. When the Bresovica bells are introduced, they appear in their afterglow at first, without the attack, folding out beautifully down an artificially extended duration, panning above lumpy, dark sounds of clay clod character — or these clods could be slowed-down echoes of steps through a tunnel. The bell afterglow deepens in the pitches to serious, stern, opaque veils of impermeability, forming deep blue and purple chords, like those steady, long La Monte Young chords from the Dream House on Manhattan “bent out of shape by society’s pliers” into wobbly bands approaching their breaking point. An acceleration and escalation is relieved into a calming, unifying bell chord, and things get more relaxed and unreal, enchanted — lost in a sonic fairytale of magic whistles — which in turn swoop down into a smaller crowd of familiarity; people who talk friendly without tenseness. Time hovers in a rumble, not knowing which way to go.

Track 14. à la cire perdue (2004) [15:27]

The composer explains the title: “Cire perdue is a time-honored sculptural technique still in use today. It involves the covering of an initial sculptural model with wax prior to casting the object in bronze. During the casting, the wax melts and disappears, is lost, leaving the finished bronze statue as the final reflection of the artist’s work.”

Radford uses this description as a metaphor for the way he utilizes the source sounds — his own instrumental music — in the piece.

With a candy wrapping paper crackle and a copper insect flyby, the piece opens into a tumbling rumble magnificence, like deep brown chocolate filling through the cracks of the sense of taste. The last and farthest reverberation of a voice aaahs in pannings across the perimeter. Mist hovers across the wetlands, against the bleak light of a promising spring morn. Inside your mind slowed-down rotor blades beat the air. Electronic birds chirp in circular motions while wastepaper oceans heave through the civilizations of this planet, visible in the eight-minute light.

There is a slightly withheld force at play in à la cire perdue, and a tight, elegant kinetic energy; an inkling of much more power in store, the way you feel on your racing bike when you cycle fast and smooth and know that you have much more to give, stored in your amassed training and your muscles and your mental resources.

Distant, panning nightjar prayer beads are thumbed through the obscurity of pine tree hideouts, deep inside the music. An ocean rises inside the sounds as I come to grips with perspectives and realize it might be a closely miked glass of an alcoholic beverage with ice cubes, tilted and twirled in a ring-marked female hand at an upper-class party in Mayfair in 1966, reflecting light blue velvet and golden frames around the walls, Mick Jagger’s dynamic mouth moving about in his face as he bespeaks a young Marianne Faithful

Yes, visions supersede each other when you let Laurie Radford’s music take hold, not without pleasure!

Track 15. Mining Inference (2003) [3:05]

This is a variation of interferences III (1983-IV), composed by the Canadian-Argentinean alcides lanza. It begins with the distribution of short, rhythmicized portions of sound, which are repeated and developed in an almost shortwave static manner. The sounds which to begin with are gray and bland and anonymous bucket-in-the-shed finds, after a while give way to shreds and recollections of instrumental, almost identifiable sounds from a world that once was called real… Nowadays we know that all we see is just patterns of atoms, which themselves do not really exist either, disappearing into the flux of existence/nonexistence; a bewildering state of vibration — so we’d better just enjoy the music!

Rickety oralities start to emerge like gnats in between sparse but decisive piano tones, panned madly, and a humming machine sits heavily backstage.

A lovely miniature, which the composer has worked hard with. Very nice; a treat!

Track 16. Terms of Occupancy (2004, 05-06) [10:08]

Laurie Radford explains that this work began as an 8-channel variation and extension of à la cire perdue.

The immediate impression as the music kicks off is that of a flock of jackdaws and crows stirring and flying up, perhaps at the sneaky arrival of a black-and-white cat with sharp claws and supple moves! As the musical motion spirals upwards like a beanstalk in a fairytale, silvery dust falls all around, sonically, each little speck reflecting everything and all. Whistling and chirping trajectories rise and fall, and somewhat denser areas begin to take shape, appearing as thuds or local percussive events. For a while things gear up to an extent that makes analogies to Stockhausen’s Sirius spacecraft viable. This tight-knit motion upwards is brutally cut, as brief silences and choppier sounds tumble in, like rock gardens in an emotional ambience; like cruel recollections when you wake up in your body. Things keep changing too fast to keep up, while associative visions spread out their sheets in the wind before you. The sky is no limit. Angelic choirs soar out all across the horizon in a Gustave Doré setting. Little whirlwind sonorities dance across the West Texan lowlands like Persian Surgery Dervishes while the dead are swept in the color blue.


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Review

by Frans De Waard in Vital #620 (The Netherlands), March 25, 2008 |6419|

Matériaux composés
“They all make perfect sense, a fine, balanced audio picture. Sounds […] are placed with great care in the right spot.”

Sometimes, afterwards, I think I was a bit too harsh. When I recently reviewed a couple of DVD (but with music only) releases by empreintes DIGITALes, the final review was a re-run of the previous reviews — as to outline the repeat character of the music. That was, perhaps, not entirely fair. But it make want to listen with much anticipation to the release by Louis Dufort. That was, again, all wrong, as this one, I must admit (and never afraid of admitting when I’m wrong), I quite liked. The differences between this, and some of the precedent releases by the label, are to me clear. Dufort’s interest doesn’t lie in the ways sounds are processed by similar pieces of software which seem to be applying to the other composers, but he rather uses a more roughly shaped compositional method. His sounds are more direct, more in your face, not processed beyond belief as some of the sounds what they are. In, for instance, Matério_***, there are farm sounds, scraping the surface, cooking sounds and clusters of instruments. They all make perfect sense, a fine, balanced audio picture. Sounds do not bounce up and down, back and forth, stumbling and tumbling, but are placed with great care in the right spot. Of course Dufort uses all sorts of computer techniques but as a means, not an end. O.k. so I was perhaps wrong in writing off this label. It doesn’t mean I will necessary straight away applaud everything they do, but this release made up things in an excellent way.


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Review

by Randy Raine-Reusch in Musicworks #100 (Canada), March 21, 2008 |3535|


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