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Rendu visible is Darren Copeland’s first solo CD as a composer. It comprises three works created between 1993 and 1996. The main piece is the three-part Night Camera. The composer describes it as a “quest for worlds existing within the territory of the ordinary.” And that is exactly what these three 8-minute Polaroids are. Each movement has been developed using a basic recording from the World Soundscape Collection of the Simon Fraser University (Hildegard Westerkamp has been known to use the same source). An environmental recording of a particular landscape was delicately modified, with added sounds and textures. The result is well-tailored, the composer’s work seamless… and the piece as uneventful as a deserted peak at 2 a.m. The listener is invited to dream up the scene; that leaves him a lot of work. Rendered visible is more satisfactory: these environmental recordings, blending a sea shore and probably something more exotic, truly come to life. A delicate melody in the low register (like a synthesized bass flute) is heard through the fog — beautiful. The more acousmatic Reaching for Tomorrow provides haunting lugubrious moments. Rendu visible makes a short (40 minutes) and uneven debut. It was released in empreintes DIGITALes’ budget-priced series “Compact-Compact.”
Darren Copeland’s compositional output for tape medium draws entirely on environmental sounds. His teachers have included Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University) and Jonty Harrison (University of Birmingham). Theatre soundtrack composition is a continuing influence on his thinking about music, and his most recent work crosses the boundaries between acousmatic art, radio art and theatre.
CD notes by the composer outline his perspective on the relationship between associative sound and visual imagery, a theme reflected in the titles that appear on this CD. His theoretical approach is explored in a recent article for The Journal of Electroacoustic Music (SANS) entitled ‘Indifference or Ambiguity’. Here, the composer argues for the need to centralize the associative properties of environmental sounds in acousmatic music practice.
There are three tracks on the CD: Rendered Visible; Reaching for Tomorrow; and Night Camera, made up of Maritime Vision, Prairie Dream and Vanishing at Sea. A wide palette of sonic material is drawn on throughout, and the overall production is outstanding.
The danger of the theoretical stance taken here is that in practice it runs the risk of degenerating into new age, ambient and environmental pap. On this CD, the skill and talent in layering and manipulating the material selected results in subtle and complex textures that are anything but trite. It is a fine balancing act superbly controlled for the most part, the results being often internally ambiguous and certainly poetic.
Rendered Visible quotes various natural sources that are combined with unfamiliar sounds. A refreshing aspect is the way the flux of the work is referenced to seemingly contradictory natural events. A sense of the dramatic carries this finely paced work forward.
The second track, Reaching for Tomorrow, again uses the technique of controlling tension and relaxation through the layering material. The sonic references are wider here, and include surrogate instrumental gestures. This creates a slowly evolving texture, brooding, sparse and foreboding.
The longest piece is Night Camera. The composer notes that ‘night camera’ is ‘an imaginary listening aid that like an infrared scanner allowing one to probe regions lying beyond the common, everyday frame of experience’. The analogy sets the frame of reference well, allowing one to enter a cinematic paradigm.
The three tracks that make up Night Camera each deal with a different type of environment within the general theme. Source material includes environmental and city sound references. Each work is powerfully evocative and the dynamic shape is carefully controlled throughout to keep the listener engaged.
The strength of this CD is its rich referencing to known/associative sound balanced and juxtaposed with unfamiliar material, and the manipulation of gestures and textures that are both familiar and exotic. A greater variety of generative methods may help to broaden the approach taken, adding to its versatility.
Combining notions of the theatrical and film scoring with acousmatic music overcomes many of the semiotic limitations of a purely acousmatic approach. It also has the potential to attract more than an academic audience for acousmatic art. The works presented here explore one way the two approaches may be synthesized.
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If Bernhard Günter’s time, dreaming itself struck me as having an acutely visual effect on me as a listener, then Darren Copeland’s Rendu visible takes this theme and makes it his most explicit concern. Drawn from entirely environmental sounds, the pieces presented on this disc are rich aural textures suggesting a most intricate visual environment. Sounds of rushing water, the wind, clusters of birds, voices, cars, and a host of other mysterious and visually suggestive sounds populate the three works on this disc, composed between 1993 to 1996. For all their aural wonder, these recordings remind us that even if we are standing in the apparent ‘quiet’ of a desolate wooded area, if you start to pay attention you realise that what you perceived as quiet is actually full of life and sound.
In the liner notes to the disc, Copeland describes his theory that “a composition using real world sounds is able to re-awaken latent visual imagery in the mind of the listener, as if this disc was really an empty canvas or a fresh stock of film, [where] soundscapes furnish the listening imagination with a magical lens for viewing invisible worlds.” Indeed. And this accounts, says Copeland, for the ubiquitous visual analogies used by so many acousmatic composers in the titles or program notes for their works. Copeland takes this notion one step further, though. He seems to have an implicit desire to stimulate specific visual images and meaning through his works, though he admits his limitations:
It is virtually impossible for me, at the present time, to stipulate what visual image or associated meaning is being evoked for any person at any particular moment on this disc. Not until credible studies are undertaken about the imagination’s ability to visualize from sonic sensory input alone can I comfortably approach composition outside the realm of musical abstraction.
But this for me represents a darker, more autocratic side of musical expression that I prefer not to endorse. To accomplish this wish of being able to stimulate specific visual responses in the mind of the listener is to rob the listener of his autonomy, to rob him of the chief pleasure of listening, which, like reading, allows the listener to make free associations and respond to a piece on his own terms, contributing to an open ‘dialogue’ between composer, music and listener. This idea takes the concept of musical rhetoric — which, of course, is already an immensely suggestive medium, which already directs the imagination in extremely powerful ways — one serious step further. A step I’d rather not see taken. You can set up your piece in whatever manner you like, build the most contrived listening environment, feed your listeners with descriptions, images, and suggestive sounds. But let the listener explore what he is given at his own pace, and with the freedom of his own perception and sensibilities. Otherwise, what you’re left with is a row of rotting cabbages. Hardly what you’d call a listener’s utopia.
This CD is just wonderful, that is the only way how we could start this review.
Darren Copeland’s compositions are made entirely from environmental sounds. Which results in atmospheric music. Five compositions are there on the CD, sometimes you wonder to be in a somehow dark atmosphere surrounded with the sound of extincted annimals. A soon later you are in the middle of a beautifull nature with full of tranquillity. Sounds from nature comes and go combined with unknown sounds that all brings an other dimension in the atmospheric compositions.
This CD is just wonderfull, that is the only way how we can end this review.
In the “compact compact” series, we have: Darren Copeland, a young explorer working totally in the medium of tapes and environmental sound. This seems to be his debut. His sound fabrics tend to sit somewhere between The Hafler Trio and Luc Ferrari (for want of a better brief analogy) and do very little musically. His success is in his use of subtle manipulation, layering, and vague use of a melodic context.
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