Pretty much anyone with a functioning cochlea will find something to like on this massive collection of recent electroacoustic works from the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (Communauté électroacoustique canadienne). 34 pieces from 32 composers in 11 countries can seem a bit daunting at first, but a taste for surprising sounds and liberal use of your CD player’s fast-forward and skip-track buttons will get you through. And you’ll be the better for the journey!
The packaging for this two CD set is a bit odd — the discs don’t really fit in the sleeve, and the large booklet is at odds with its container. The cover image is nice, though. The booklet, written in English and French, is thorough and useful, with a brief introduction to the CDs and composer-written notes for each of the pieces.
It would be difficult to put together 34 different pieces of music and not be struck by how different they are (although Short Music for Short People managed pretty well!). Still, it’s worth mentioning that regardless of your preconceptions of the CEC/acousmatic scene (you do have preconceptions, don’t you? Heathen.), these discs represent an impressive range of styles, sounds and techniques, all within the rough boundaries of the acousmatic genre. That means there’s no punk rock or dance music here, although several of the pieces do get pretty grungy and/or rhythmic.
A few semi-randomly picked highlights:
Adrian Moore’s Soundbodies: Bodypart (1998) is full of suggestive, out-of-body voices, zipping around like jacked up goblins. Antti Saario’s B-Side (1998) manages to be both funky and mysterious. Au-delà du miroir (1998) by Daniel Zimbaldo is a long, lovely arch. Steve Bradley’s “volalle melodie vi to trot” / “fowl melody to trot” (1999) is a strange, crackling collage of voices and fuzz. DUO (1997-98) by jef chippewa is a balloonaphobe’s nightmare. Gordon Fitzell’s Zipper Music II (1998) is just as much fun as its name implies.
Although a few of the pieces here are a bit too acousmatic for my taste (a ball rolls, a door slams, a baby cries, a train toots), this really is an impressive, listenable collection of electronic music. If you’ve been wondering what this “electroacoustic” thing that you keep hearing about is, or if you’re just looking to add a chunk of contemporary electronic music to your collection, then Presence II would be a fine place to start.
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Acousmatic composer Ned Bouhalassa, born in France but now making his home in Montréal, has been active in the promotion and production of electroacoustic music for a number of years. Aérosol presents various works composed and recorded from 1990 through 1998, and comes packaged with liner notes on each piece by Bouhalassa himself. Sponge-like, Bouhalassa absorbs elements from a diverse array of influences (cinema, visual art, techno, environmental recordings…). His music is full of difference and variety. Each sound playfully moves through the stereo spectrum (an aeroplane in the sky, the buzzing of insects, the crackles of a digital landscape), and it’s unlikely you’ll ever hear the same sound twice. Each of these compositions take on their own themes and compositional techniques. The first, Jets, explores the idea of an automated sound projection, where sound is perceived as moving “in an almost intuitive manner.” Constamment (autoportrait) is a selfportrait expressing the artist’s anomalous memory and his state of mind on turning 37. Clearly evident in this piece is Bouhalassa’s love of techno music, for occasionally a thumping bass or a rhythmic interlude will force itself into the otherwise abstract sound environment. The next piece, Attraction, attempts to express any number of attractions in life and in art. Recordings of acoustic sources were put through the hoops of digital processing and traditional musique concrète techniques. The final piece is my favourite here. Bouffée délirante (Maddening Exhalation) is described as “an attempt to realize what has been coined ‘cinema for the ear’”. There is, as is characteristic of all these compositions, a complex array of sound sources and moods. But what I like most about this piece is the way it jumps suddenly from one “scene” to another; a smooth intonation (from a cello? a violin?) will suddenly be cut and move into a whole new sound structure, only to return back again, clumsily, at a later moment. Bouhalassa calls this a “jump-cut gesture”; these interruptions are like film montage for the ears, breaking up the narrative or moving it along. There are no words, but the sounds tell a story all on their own. This is music to provoke your imagination and make your ears tingle with excitement.
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Louis Dufort est un touche-à-tout très talentueux. Passionné de musique électronique, il s’intéresse aussi au cinéma, à la peinture et à la danse contemporaine. La dernière de l’album [Connexion], Décap, est d’ailleurs fondée sur des travaux musicaux composés pour la Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Ici, point de longues plages planantes, mais un montage serré, rythmé et une utilisation pertinente des échantillonnages vocaux (dont la voix de dame Chouinard). Du mouvement, de l’allant. Bref de l’électroacoustique habitée et invitante. (8,5/10)
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I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about electroacoustic music. I’ve picked some stuff up over the last few years, but I still lack the appropriate perspective — I can’t help approaching and assessing electroacoustic compositions on the basis of conventions better suited to rock music. Though many works within the genre have far more to do with mathematics and sculpture than with songwriting, I continue to look for the music.
When you’re talking about a composition that sounds like loose change falling out of someone’s pocket and onto a multi-tiered metal scaffold, or a song made up of oddly-spaced taps on a series of fine-tuned cabinet doors, it’s easy to understand why pop music fans don’t gravitate to this stuff. Deprived of the recognizable verse/chorus/verse structure they savor, they’re looking for spectacle. That’s why Sondes is a good bet — both for newcomers to electroacoustic composition, and for old hands bored by bland, self-indulgent works.
Smith writes for a combination of acoustic instruments and found-sound tapes, creating mixed electroacoustic music. He makes use of instruments with distinctive voices — double bass, cello, alto flute and even accordion — and pairs them with truly striking sound effects. From the first seconds of InsideOut, which delivers a veritable “Dolby jolt,” you’ll realize that this is an album for active listeners — and for headphone fans. InsideOut is a fever-dream of sickness, referencing everything from horror-movie stringwork to feverish bodily operations. Elderly melodies are reanimated and forced to clatter across the soundscape, frightened onward by bursts of percussion. Despite a wealth of activity over several movements, the piece ends where it began, its energy nullified like an interrupted dream.
Less frenetic, Liquid Fragments 1 uses double bass and alto flute to envision music as experienced from inside the human body. It is full of activity, but somehow detached; we recognize the transition from calm to motion, and can almost identify the cause, but we lack the perspective required to understand it.
Elastic Rebound and Continental Rift are small scale sonic metaphors for grand-scale events, addressing the infinitely slow negotiations of geographic masses in a sped-up, confrontational style. The latter work makes liberal use of cello, including a series of striking classical references at its midpoint.
The Unmoved Centre is a conversation between sounds. The listener will hear an aural community come together as disparate musical and mechanical sources are woven into a dance of call and response, tiny movements negotiating for position within a greater sonic whole. Headphones, closed eyes and darkness will pay off nicely here.
Finally, the striking Convergence co-opts the accordion — an instrument, as Smith states in his notes on the piece, “commonly associated with fun, dance, drinking and local cultural events.” Though filled with moments of dissonance, the piece also bubbles with carnival-style musical humor, dispensing fragmented polkas that encourage the listener to dance amid the confusion. Though its focus occasionally descends to music-box mechanical details, Convergence remains fascinating, and sounds like an afternoon spent sharing hallucinogens with Astor Piazzolla.
Though it has its obtuse moments, most listeners will find Sondes to be a thoroughly vibrant and exciting journey, bubbling over with brain-tickling energy. Smith’s source material is rich in texture and subtlety, and you’ll experience great joy in discovering the finer details in his work.
Can a pop song enthall you like this? I doubt it.
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[Traduction] Les compositions électroacoustiques de Tutschku prouvent à quel point les délimitations des frontières entre la nouvelle musique académique et les paysages sonores post-industriels sont arbitraires — du moins à partir du résultat sonore.
Ainsi s’imposent des associations de Nurse With Wound jusqu’au grandiose Lux Æterna de Ligeti ou aussi le Gesang der Jünglinge de Stockhausen.
Des voix manipulées avec l’arrière-plan quasi-religieux, des dynamiques extrêmes et des coupures brusques forment le centre des univers sonores de Tutschku, qui changent chaque fois qu’ils apparaîssent un peu familier et intime en justement quelque chose de totalement étrange et nouveau et indique de nouvelles facettes encore plus foncées.
Tutschkus elektroakustische Kompositionen beweisen, wie willkürlich die Grenzziehungen zwischen akademischer Neuer Musik und den Soundscapes des Post-Industrial-Undergrounds zumindest vom klanglichen ergebnis oft sind.
So drängen sich hier beim Hören Assoziationen von Nurse With Wound bis hin zu Ligetis grandiosem Lux Æterna auf, oder auch Stockhausens Gesang der Jünglinge. Passenderweise wurde letzterer bei einem gemeinsamen Auftritt in Barcelona zum Ehrenmitglied von Coil. Manipulierte Stimmen mit quasi-religiösem Hintergrund, extreme Dynamiken und abrupte Brüche bilden den Mittelpunkt von Tutschkus Klanguniversum, das sich immer dann, wenn es eine wenig vertraut erscheint, zu etwas völlig Fremden verändert und immer wieder neue, noch dunklere Facetten offenbart.
Canadian electroacoustics composer Randall Smith presents six pieces composed from 1995 through 1999. Each of these pieces is teeming with sounds and intensity; thousands of minute sounds flutter through these compositions in complex movements, revealing an intricate soundworld unlike anything I have hard before.
InsideOut is for me the most intriguing of these works. Using only sounds derived from four instruments of an orchestra (alto flute, violin, E-flat clarinet and double bass), the piece carries a certain urgency and unease about it, and a crisp resonance that is remarkable. In the liner notes, the piece is effectively described as being “a digression through small worlds, islands of experience, each demarking a facet of the whole.”
Other pieces incorporate the sound sources of live instrumentation: Liquid Fragments 1 uses double bass and alto flute; Continental Rift is a composition for cello and tape; and Convergence is for accordion and tape. There’s also a geological theme that runs through some of these recordings. Elastic Rebound attempts to explore — in electroacoustic terms — the geographical activity of the earth. The title is a reference to a phenomena relating to the tectonic behaviour of an earthquake. Continental Rift, says Smith, is a “metaphorical composition” describing the evolution of continental structures. This is perhaps the piece with the least sense of urgency, considering its theme is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary; the cello intones in a way that suggests loss or a looking back to things that were. My least favourite of the compositions is Convergence: a chaotic piece for accordion and tapes, characterised by quickly shifting movements where the accordion rides erratically in a strange “carnivalesque” manner. The CD comes packaged with lengthy elucidations by the composer on each of the pieces, describing their compositional histories. Also for each piece, the contexts, themes and impressions are discussed with great interest by Mike Hoolboom.
Randall Smith is certainly an inventive and innovative artist, experimenting with new electroacoustic techniques and creating surprising results. Each of the compositions on Sondes carries a very unique sound full of complexity and urgency, a hectic soundworld full of transitions and sharp movements.Had you told Wilhelm Müller (1797-1828) that the depressive and forsaken words he spoke through the voice of the bewildered and forlorn traveller in the final edition of Die Winterreise in 1824 would live and flourish into the 21st century, and even appear in an electroacoustic guise — could he perceive that! — he would surely have banked hard out of your trajectory and seeked out saner company!
However, this is what has happened, and the lonely and desperate winter traveller, lingering on happier summer days with a woman who would turn out to be deceptive, does turn up again in the electroacoustic workings of Daniel Leduc (1965) from Montréal. This goes to show that some writings keep there urgency throughout the ages, since man is the same now as then — just in a changing human environment - and since words that speak out of commonplace and universal experiences always will be recogonized and validatet by man wherever in time he happens to find himself.
This CD also contains a few other works by Daniel Leduc, but here I will concentrate on the main piece; Le voyage d’hiver.
Leduc hereby steps into a tradition of electroacoustics, which can be traced back well into passed decades of creative sonic illustrations. When best these auditive variations serve the purpose of furthering the understanding and the experience of the text, in the same manner as the Bible illustrations of Gustave Doré from the 19th century magnifies the events of biblical times in a way that can never be forgotten by those who grew up with them.
Sometimes these re-workings of old texts serve as a casting of a conjuration net across existence, through their old and liturgic-like forms. There can be no question about the need of such liturgies in modern society and it’s art, to handle the existential anxiety that brews just below the surface of urban man, showing up in dreams and erratic behaviour. A culture without ceremonies and liturgies slides down a sloping plane. The rites of human societies do however exist everywhere, though they may be surpressed in the materialistic world of today. However, there are many beautiful examples of life in ritualistic societies, permeated by ceremonies. The Aka pygmies of Central Africa, for example, sing a special song for the child who just has gotten a little brother or sister, so the older child won’t feel rejected or cast aside. This is civilization!
When it comes to modern electroacoustic presentations of old texts, the majority of works are of religious origin. Moreover, most of these works have sprung out of the French speaking sphere, like France or Canada. A random list can look like this: Pierre Henry’s Apocalypse de Jean and Messe de Liverpool, Jacques Lejeune’s Le Cantique des Cantiques and Messe aux Oiseaux, Michel Chion’s Requiem and Xavier Garcia’s Apocalypse.
The secular works are more sparse, but they exist. Examples might be Jean Schwarz’s amazing Quatre Saisons — a setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Vier Jahreszeiten from 1797 — François Bayle’s Purgatoire & Paradis terrestre — an electroacoustic rendering of The Divine Comedy by Dante, which also might be referred to as religious, of course… - and the work we talk about here; Le voyage d’hiver — a set of twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Müller (1797-1828) from 1824, made famous by Franz Schubert’s composition.
I have always had great pleasure in listening to the great interpretation given by Hans Hotter (baritone) and Gerald Moore (piano) in a recording from 1954, which I rate as a first choice of a traditional lieder interpretation of the work in question. It is of course very interesting to hear how Daniel Leduc treats the material in an electroacoustic manner. Well, there is nothing new or surprising about the way Daniel Leduc traverses these poems. He has done it in a traditional way, electroacoustically speaking, and he has succeeded very well. His work compares well to the aforementioned electroacoustic variations on old texts, and in this tradition he now belongs, without any disturbing glitches or anomalities. The text appears in it’s original language — German — and the words are spoken by Montréal actor Erwin Potitt. Daniel Leduc uses musique concrète-methods in addition to the pure electronic alterations, applying concrete and altered concrete sounds around the text, and he utilizes established methods of permutating the voice itself.
After the twenty-four poems he has added a short concluding “coda” without words, rounding off this very well worked-through piece of art, which in itself is an homage to poets of the past, in a setting of today.
These kind of works give a continuation through the flow of time, and a sense of belonging, a sense of direction, and a time for contemplation. It is a great pleasure to receive all these re-workings and variations of old but timeless pieces of art. They build bridges from yesterday to today and back, and on these bridges we can walk back and forth, and truly feel that all places are here, all times are now!
An analysis of Wilhelm Müller’s text and the circumstances around Schubert’s setting can be found at: www.bway.net/~hartung/schubert.html and more on Schubert and Winterreise, for example translations, can be enjoyed at: www.gopera.com/winterreise/.
[This review was also published in SAN Diffusion]