Contact! 9.1

Contact! 9.1 Automne 1995 / Autumn 1995


In Review
CDs François Bayle - L'Expérience acoustique volumes 5-6 MAGISON, DIFFUSION i MéDIA The French label Magison, in collaboration with the INA-GRM, has undertaken an ambitious retrospective of the music of one of France's principle electroacousticians, François Bayle. Six volumes of his work have now appeared with another eleven volumes in preparation. Volumes 5-6 present a series of works from 1970-72 entitled L'Expérience Acoustique. This two hour work (originally planned to last ten hours (!) eventually continued in the 1980's with Son Vitesse-Lumière) consists of five sections, each exploring a different aspect of human perception and communication. L'aventure du cri (The Adventure of the Cry) is the sounds of the emergence of life; Le langage des fleurs (The Language of Flowers) delves into the appearance of things, the "power that certain sounds have"; La preuve par le sens (Proof By Meaning) is a type of listening exercise, eloquent, inquisitive, inviting, yet bewildering in its immensity; L'Épreuve par le son (Proof By Sound) is a twenty-five minute study on a single sound; and finally, La philosphie du non (The Philosophy of No) exploits the "lessons of contradiction", of opposing sound forces and the energy unleashed by their confrontation. L'Expérience Acoustique is like one of those all-night epic tales one listens to in anticipation for the answer to mysteries one is hardly aware of on a daily basis. This is the flesh and blood of musique concrète. The predominance of electronically-generated sound as opposed to sounds captured from the environment is noteworthy and contrary to what one might come to expect from a seasoned electroacoustic composer of the French school. But these raspy analog timbres take on a vibrant life of their own as Bayle sculpts them in the guise of natural sounds and gestures. Above all, it is the poetic dimension of this art, this careful placing of sounds in time which Bayle has taken such pains to understand and reveal. Although one would admittedly have to be an aficionado of Bayle's aesthetic to visit some of these works with great frequency, L'Expérience Acoustique is an important audio document, historically, technically and as a testiment to the overall aesthetic panorama of the music of François Bayle. The accompanying 50 page booklet is a wealth of information about Bayle, his ideas and his music and contains some telling photos of the composer in action in the 1970's. Laurie Radford Laurie Radford composes instrumental music and ea, and teaches at Concordia and McGill Universities. Michel Chion - Gloria Metamkine, DIFFUSION i MéDIA The most appealing electroacoustic work I have heard recently, Gloria from Michel Chion is an intriguingly layered composition. This is one of the rare works that I listen to repeatedly. It both soothes and disquiets. Instruments, male and female voices, ambient sounds crossfade and collide contrapuntally. The sounds are largely recognizable because minimally processed. 'Cinema for the ears', the work feels narrative but not obviously. Small town ambiences, accordion, water and echo pull me into the work. After five minutes, upclose gunshots and crunching noises suggest something very wrong. A male character wails in pain "Gloria!..." This work even has a recurring melody. It floats in, floats by, is sung, is whistled. After sixteen minutes, the seemingly wounded male starts to grotesquely wail his 'glorias', almost funny but not quite. This work is perplexingly subtle, accessible, moody and challenging, and beautiful. Frank Koustrup Frank Koustrup is a composer living in Montréal. He has been instrumental in keeping the CEC office functioning this past year. Michel Chion - Requiem empreintes DIGITALes The twelfth release from empreintes DIGITALes (which now boasts a catalogue of twenty one CD's exemplifying the diversity of the electroacoustic arts) is a collaboration with INA-GRM, and is one of a number of recent projects involving international electroacoustic artists. This disc is of special note since the principal work, Requiem, was first presented on vinyl by INA-GRM in the year of its completion and premiere in 1973. Chion is a senior French electroacoustic composer and one of the art's principle theoreticians advocating a return to the noncausal principles at the origin of musique concrète, and composes rigorously in this style. He has a large and diverse oeuvre dating back to the sixties including many large scale 'concrete melodramas' such as La tentation de Saint-Antoine and Le Prisonnier du son. Requiem, based upon the text for the Mass for the Dead, presents an array of 'testimonies' from various voices in ten movements over the course of 37 minutes. The blending and rapid juxtaposition of electronic sounds, environmental soundbites, a myriad of vocal styles and contexts presenting texts heavy with centuries of meaning, Requiem creates a lurching and sometimes startling dramatic course which runs the gamut from the maniacal Sanctus to the transcendantal final movement, Libera Me. The mosaic-like Variations which follow arise from a period of technical studies undertaken by Chion in the late 1980's. Constantly changing blocks of contrasting materials anchored by a short waltz theme, develop into a reflection and "affirmation of the whirlwind of life". The final work on the disc, Nuit noire, is a visceral example of Chion's monodramatic style. It presents an anonymous moaning and groaning hero who wanders somnabulistically amidst a series of nightmarish dream sequences. Anguish, terror, insanity...a portrait of the depths to which mankind can descend. Michel Chion's work is musique concrète at its purist and leanest, perhaps also at its most profound. Laurie Radford David Eagle and Hope Lee - emotion New Concert Discs David Eagle and Hope Lee have pursued their diverse aesthetic visions and musical careers from Montréal to Germany and California to Calgary. On emotion they offer the listener two of each of their works. Eagle's Solitudes (1990/92) couples a pianist with a MAX-driven computer partner via the Disklavier piano. The result is a virtuosic piano duo in four movements which exhibits a wide variety of approaches to writing for this extended piano. The piece moves fluidly from delicate, filigree clouds of criss-crossing voices to boldly delineated harmonies and registral designs. Eagle's second work, Traces (1991), combines a flautist performing with a MAX/SampleCell instrument that interprets the live performer's actions and responds with canonic material, variations, new material and in some cases takes the lead as it distills its own unique musical personality from the flautist's input. There is an organic sense to the work, the computer instrument remaining for the most part closely allied to the timbral and gestural language of the flute materials, following it closely, at times spinning a gentle web of voices around the flute, and then near the end of the work, finally establishing its own sonic image. ...I, Laika... (1988-89) for flute, cello, and piano by Hope Lee is adventurous in its instrumental writing and in-triguing in its formal design. A sense of natural develop-ment balanced with both meditative and propulsive tendencies carries the work into many expressive areas over its twenty minute duration. The instruments establish and maintain a distinct individuality and provide three simultaneous perspectives of the same musical journey, rallying together at certain points, at others meeting in conflict. The final work on the disc, Lee's entend, entend le passé qui marche... (1992) is for piano and tape. A fragile, timeless quality persists throughout this work with the focus delicately alternating between piano and tape materials. The tape part once again takes as its model the extended piano consisting of processed piano recordings with some additional vocal chants. These chants set the hovering, other-worldly tone at the very beginning of the work and return from time to time to subsume the piano in an ethereal resonance. emotion was produced in collaboration with CBC Calgary and The Banff Centre for the Arts and features performers from the New Works Calgary Ensemble. Laurie Radford Gilles Gobeil - La mécaniques des ruptures empreintes DIGITALes Winner of this past year's Stockholm Electronic Arts Award and of numerous other international and national prizes over the past decade, Gilles Gobeil has established his refined and singular approach to electroacoustic composition with a growing series of works. This 1994 CD from empreintes DIGITALes brings together eight of his works from the past decade. The disc begins with Gobeil's most successful work to date, Le Vertige Inconnu (1993), a work that in a sense summarizes the composer's preoccupations found in varying degrees of evolution in the other works on the disc. He uses visceral sound materials that are drawn from machines, industry and the urban environment; fine attention to structural detail where abrupt, screaming sequences of grinding and whining metal are juxtaposed with the relative repose of whirring gears, hissing steam and rich, throbbing drones; and new spatial environments where these industrial voices are given shape, size, and speed as they collide and combine in ever-new trajectories and textures. Le Vertige Inconnu is severe, and of a beautiful purity of design and balance of form and material. Two works on the disc, Voix Blanche (1988-89) and Là où vont les nuages... (1990-91), utilize the ondes Martenot in combination with tape and additional sources of sound generation and processing via MIDI (in the case of the Là où vont les nuages... ). The ondes is not so much a soloist in these works but rather an equal sonic source contributing to and complementing the materials of the tape part with its crystalline, supple and haunting voice emerging from complex gestural and timbral constructs. It only predominates, like a sole survivor, in the ghostly interludes that hover softly between the main phrases of friction, collision and impending climactic punctuation. La Ville Machine (1992), "an electroacoustic drama on the subject of sound ecology", is the heart of the disc both by its duration and its breadth of expression. There is an unflagging tension between breathless voices sharing images, nightmares, a mission fraught with confusion and apprehension, immersed in an environment constantly shifting from grotesque urban punctuations to collages of human activity, the seashore, the street, the playground... and the hopeful words of children. There is an urgency to the work and its contents, unsettling, yet optimistic in its unabashed confrontation and its embrace of the very source of the destruction it alludes to: the mechanized city. Rivage (1986) is perhaps the most blatantly visceral of the works presented here. It clearly reveals Gobeil's early preoccupation with industrial sound materials and formal structures driven forward by the very weight of the sounds they contain. It features a more prominent use of fabricated materials in combination with environmental sources than the later works, but already maintains a darkly pensive character that finds its way into most of the later works. The earliest work presented on La mécanique des ruptures, Traces (1985) reveals, like Rivage, the seeds of Gobeil's gestural and structural preoccupations: the contrast between highly charged textures and large, quivering spaces inhabited by delicate shimmers of sound and the chirping of natural environments. The reverse chronological order of the works on the disc takes us from concision and refinement back to a time of searching and discovery. Try reprogramming your CD player and follow the composer's original journey! Laurie Radford alcides lanza - New Music from the Americas, 2 Shelan Several recent CD releases from Shelan productions have highlighted alcides lanza as composer, most notably Trilogy from 1992. This second release in the New Music from the Americas series focuses upon another aspect of lanza's activities, that of solo performer of works for piano with tape and/or electronics. lanza is an untiring promoter of new works from established as well as young, budding composers and this disc offers the listener a sampling of the repertoire which made up part of his infamous Piano Marathons of 1987 and 1992. The disc combines several Canadian works written for lanza with some older works from North and South American composers he has championed in recent years. The majority of the works are for solo piano with two others combining the piano with tape and one using electronic transformations. The first work on New Music from the Americas, 2 is a lengthy essay by the Argentinian composer Juan Carlos Paz entitled Música 1946. This is the first recording of this seminal one movement dodecaphonic work which, written in 1946, foreshadowed many of the applications of 12-tone writing to be taken up later by the principle European and American serial composers. Two short works from 1968 by Bengt Hambraeus, Klockspel and Invenzione 2, offer a glimpse at the unique voice of this prolific composer and demonstrate both lanza's subtle, as well as fiery, keyboard skills. Several works from the 1970s are included on this compilation. Brazilian Claudio Santoro's Mutationen III (1971) is the most "extended" of all of the works presented on the recording deriving its tape and live materials from both traditional and more adventurous approaches to sounding the piano. The tape and piano materials are closely allied creating a piano duo effect. The focus here is on articulation and timbre, variety and nuance, the rhythmic and dynamic shape of the work floating from distant whispers to thundering cascades. Another work from the 1970s, Mirrors (1978) for pianist and tape recordist, by the American composer/pianist Richard Bunger, is a long-time lanza favorite with its perpetuum mobile character and its use of tape delay as an integral part of the compositional scheme. A trio of works from young Canadian composers round out the disc. Brent Lee's Anteriorities (1989) for piano and tape investigates a state of resonance and recall. The piano presents a lingering yet incessant series of harmonies while the tape echoes and projects the timbral essence of the instrument. Of experiential fruit (1988) for solo piano by Micheline Roi alternates an insistent driving character with extended ethereal interludes concentrating on extended piano sonorities. Unfortunately, neither of the two types of music manages to sustain its potential towards a convincing fusion or conclusion. Chris Howard's solo piano piece Chanson d'automne (1989) probes autumnal shades of lyricism, pensive, dark and slow moving. A rigidity of formal design and dodecaphonic language often overpowers these potentially fruitful characteristics The trilingual program notes of New Music from the Americas, 2 provide a wealth of information about the composers and their music and the disc offers the added listening pleasure of having been recorded with Natural Surround Sound technology. This is a strong addition to the recorded repertoire of twentieth century piano music representing both new Canadian voices and mid-century classics. Laurie Radford Alvin Lucier - Clocker Lovely Music Alvin Lucier has long been known as a sonic experimenter. Whether he is working with feedback systems (I Am Sitting in a Room) or naturally occurring radio waves (Sferics), Lucier has always produced interesting process pieces. Clocker is no exception. Here is a work of nearly 45 minutes in duration which consists solely of the sound of a clock ticking. It is the manipulation of this ticking sound which makes the piece an entrancing listen. The composer proceeded with the idea of making a clock speed-up or slow-down by simply concentrating on it. With the aid of a contact mic, digital delay and galvanic skin sensor, the composer has succeeded in creating this illusion. Almost any attempt to play this work as a piece of background music/noise is generally futile. The listener is most often drawn in to the soundscape of the ticking clock and led away from any other business at hand. Chris Meloche Chris Meloche is an electroacoustic artist living in London Ontario. He hosts and produces the weekly radio show Wired for Sound, PO Box 1403 Stn A, London ON N6A 5M2 Daniel McCarthy - ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC Truemedia Records A Michigan native, Daniel McCarthy now teaches music at Indiana State University. Music included on this CD represents his electroacoustic works dating from 1989 to 1993. Works like Concerto for Marimba, Percussion and Synthesizers and TREEBEARD: Ent and Wife present a spontaneous, lively and quirky feel. Sections segue from sombre quiet moments to manic percussive dialogues between live musicians and drum machines. Musically, the material runs a line stretching from reference points as diverse as Boulez, Zappa and Gentle Giant. An interesting mix, to say the least. Chris Meloche Neil B. Rolnick - ElectriCity O.O. Discs American composer Neil B. Rolnick's 1992 CD release ElectriCity offers four pieces: an extended chamber music work for instruments and electronics, and three short works for soloist with or without computer-generated tape. The "title track" ElectriCity (1991), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, synthesizer, sampler, and digital processing is more than forty minutes in duration, and presents fourteen sections of music based on themes of electricity and the music of the Balkans. In actual fact, it is difficult to discern any concrete evidence of these influences in this series of rambling musical statements which are given a clichéd dash of synthesizer flavour from time to time. For a work presented as using the latest in technology by a composer with Rolnick's track record (he teaches electroacoustic and media techniques at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), the extent of the electroacoustic work is disappointing. The electroacoustic sources for the most part take a back seat to the acoustic instruments, adding little splashes of colour here and there, setting up delayed copies of instruments to increase the density of sections, and never veering from a pitch-oriented style except for the sound of a passing truck here and a percussion sample there. The forty minute duration of the work is especially problematic in terms of the overall formal design and shape of the piece. If the fourteen sections of the piece were short works in there own right, one could perhaps credit them for the limited musical world each sets out to explore. After forty minutes of trying to find a convincing shape from section one to fourteen?! The often banal and directionless instrumental writing did nothing to substantiate the situation especially since it represents 95% of the piece. The shorter solo works are more successful. Wondrous Love (1991) for trombone and computer-generated tape is based on an Appalachian hymn, and features the masterful playing of George Lewis. The computer-generated materials intermingle, lead, follow, accompany and generally provide a convincing counter and complement to Lewis's wide-ranging performance skills. Blowing (1980) for solo flute is the only work on the disc which does not involve some electroacoustic means. Flautist Robert Dick's ability to extend the timbral and expressive compass of the flute results in a work that in many ways presents a richer palette than the "plugged-in" works on the disc. The final work on ElectriCity, Ever-Livin' Rhythm (1977) for solo percussion and computer-generated tape, draws its inspiration and musical materials from Ba-Benzele pygmies of central Africa. The vital, lurching rhythms and colours of the percussion part are filled out by the tape materials, extending the timbral registers and contributing some interesting musical ideas of its own. The warbly FM textures and punctuations seem somewhat archaic now, but they serve a strong musical purpose in relation to the percussion materials which ultimately outweighs their timbral shortcomings. One has such hopes for the wedding of music and the computer. Simply using it as a digital delay unit and as a rudimentary emulator of acoustic timbres hardly satisfies the hopes of not only today but of even a decade ago. Sitting comfortably in the lap of simplicity will never push forward the aspirations of expression. Laurie Radford Vivienne Spiteri - comme si l'hydrogène...the desert speaks... J&W Recordings This recording displays the excellent and highly virtuosic multidimensional playing of Canada's foremost harpsichordist, Vivienne Spiteri. High in Canadian content, this contemporary music CD opens impressively with David Keane's Turbo Toccata (1989). The engaging digital sounds are triggered from two TX802 synths activated by a MIDI system. With good forward momentum, this piece is one of the best composed by Keane. Swedish composers Hedman and Karlsson are known in the field of ea for the quality of their production and the singularity of their collaborative approach. Their piece, for amplified harpsichord and computer generated tape, also includes recorded harpsichord sounds. Spiteri's extended techniques include using mallets and other objects, obtaining novel tone-colours by producing harmonics and plucked sounds. In La Ventana deshabitada (The vacant Window) Argentinean Elsa Justel recorded only the resonance after the onset of the sound and a collection of mechanical noises typical of the instrument. The dialogue between live and recorded parts is animated and poetic, organized as an ever increasing drama, climaxing around four minutes into the piece. Doubling by Tim Brady is recorded here in a version for harpsichord and reverberation. Straightforward in its formal aspects, the obsessive percussive ideas alternate or overlap with the quasi trill melodic line. A more edgy section follows, with shorter ostinato phrases creating a hesitant mood which abruptly ends on a single chord. Saariaho, in Jardin secret II ( The secret Garden) fuses the pre-recorded harpsichord with Spiteri's own voice. This expressive work has an intimacy absent in the other works. The sustained tones on the tape contrast with the short-lived sounds of the instrument. A different piece with a different voice! The desert speaks... (1988), by Bruce Pennycook is for extended harpsichord, computer and MIDI synthesizers. The work is divided into three distinct parts, the last a quasi toccata as a natural answer to the more meditative second section. All actions are triggered by the performer, including the participation of a computer program that surrounds the harpsichord sound with other timbres, echoes performance gestures, and plays back MIDI sequences. A fine performance of a strong musical statement from Pennycook from his ongoing series titled Praescio (the Latin root for "prescience"). The final track is by Canadian Paul Dolden, well known for his 'excessive music'. Here, Spiteri's harpsichord confronts hundreds of digital tracks with instrumental sounds, producing a purely acoustical phenomena which can only take place using electroacoustic technology. Not much information is given about Jacek Gruzdien. His Turdus musicus (1986), brief, repetitive and described as a virtuoso piece, reminded us of the rhythmic cadence of an Argentinean "malambo". It does not contribute much to the artistic content of this CD. Since the "documentary" value of recording works like the ones on this CD is undeniable, it is a pity that this J&W compact gives no data concerning composers' nationalities or information which would situate them within the chronology of twentieth century. music. The space given to the obscure elucubrations of Yves M. Larocque in the liner notes could have been used to provide data valuable for researchers. Several of the compositions were written for Spiteri. Credit is given to Eric Johnstone, who developed the MIDI system installed in Spiteri's harpsichord. It was built at the McGill University Electronic Music Studio under the supervision of Bruce Pennycook. alcides lanza alcides lanza, Honorary Member of te CEC, composer, pianist, tennis player, father, conductor, promoter of new music, publisher, teacher, director of the McGill University Electronic Music Studio, cyclist, walker, artistic director of GEMS... Yasunao Tone - Musica Iconologos Lovely Music Ltd If you ever thought that music could be completely detached from any tradition... well, this is the disc for you! Compared with other music... experimental, noise, industrial, musique concrète, you name it, this one by Japanese composer and fluxus artist Yasunao Tone is difficult to top. Initially I didn't warm up to this music... until I began to make some feeble connections. In time I recognized phrases, textures and colors. The explanatory notes let me deal with this mechanistic soundscape as a novel sonic experience. I even enjoyed the gentle touch of soft music and the lonely glissando occurring after almost 7 minutes of harsh sounds at the start of Jiao Liao Fruits. The coda of the first piece has grotesque and satirical sounds which explore a wider spectral zone. The second, Solar Eclipse in October, explores similar ideas, modulates effects to extremes, and has a richer field of textures. Musica Iconologos' (MI) sources were two ancient Chinese texts, whose characters Tone 'interpreted' as photo-images from our visual experience (some are on the CD cover). Reduced to pixel-resolutions they were digitally encoded, so the sounds in MI have a direct relationship with the photos. In the liner notes, composer Robert Ashley says "... in the mythical future (or today) somebody can translate the sounds of this CD back into pictures...". Craig Kendall from McGill University, Montréal - who was in charge of Computer Programming and Digital Sound Processing - says, "... it became obvious that the most effective algorithm to convert a digitized picture into a viable sound file was the X - Y projection method used in the optical character and music recognition fields", (an area of research where McGill staff has excelled). The generating program was the C language program Projector. The sound files produced were short, being about 20 milliseconds in length. No fewer than 187 scans from the sound sources were used to create all the music. Tone believed these to be the auditory essence of each picture, and he always remained true to his strict methodology, disregarding his personal impressions of the music. Pitch shifting was applied to certain sounds in an attempt to reflect the phonetic implication of the corresponding spoken Chinese words. This is a stunning sonic experience... but not for everyone. Try it, perhaps you will hear the phrases, careful control of the stereo image, sudden changes of tonal color and variations in textural density. You will have to be the receiver and a willing one at that. This CD might be out of the ordinary but it has its own intrinsic beauty. Notes, photography and presentation are excellent. Thanks are given to Bruce Pennycook and McGill University, the Electronic Music Studio and Computer Music Lab where the music was created, recorded and mastered. alcides lanza Christian Zanési - Grand Bruit Metamkine, DIFFUSION i MéDIA Collection Cinéma pour l'oreille, a series of mini-CDs by the French label Metamkine, now numbers nine titles with several others scheduled to appear in the near future. These mini-CDs offer a single electroacoustic work of approximately 20 to 30 minutes in duration by composers such as, among others, Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. One of the most recent release is Grand Bruit by French composer Christian Zanési. Listeners may already be familiar with Zanési's work on his INA-GRM CD Stop! l'horizon... where his refined brand of musique concrète is strongly represented. Zanési is a student of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel and works closely with François Bayle on the GRM radio broadcasts of electroacoustic music for Musique France. This distinquished lineage is apparent throughout his work in the attention to formal and sonic detail. Grand Bruit, written in 1990 at the studios of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris and remixed in 1994, is a large musique concrète work based upon that mainstay of electroacoustic resources, the train, and in particular, the R.E.R. which shuttles workers back and forth from Paris to its suburbs. From a single recording of the train's journey through eight different stations, Zanési deftly draws out melodies, rhythms and harmonies adding touches of other material to create a fascinating poetic abstraction, an "interior" voyage where the noise of the rails, forty years after Schaeffer's Étude aux chemins de fer, is still the catalyst for both physical and philosophical travels. Laurie Radford Elektroakustická hudba - Vol. 1 and 2 Experimental Studios of Slovak Radio, Bratislava These sets of discs (Volume One is 2 CDs, Volume Two is 1 CD) provide a cross-section of the work to come out of the Experimental Studio of Slovak Radio, Bratislava, from 1966 to 1994. The release of these 19 ea works results from the collapse of the communist governments in eastern Europe, which had marginalized ea production, and the relatively low cost (per minute) for the production and distribution of ea works in the CD format. The center of gravity of the first volume are works from between 1967 and 1975. The table below shows the relationship between the composers' date of birth and the year of composition. # of works Date of birth Year of composition 8 1930 - 37 1967 - 75 1 1943 1982 3 1953 - 55 1987 - 91 The styles of the first group fall largely within the 'analog electronics with concrete transformation' school of the German/Eastern European school of the 70s, combined with the inherent technical limitations of those studios. Not having to (or in some cases being able to) 'please an audience' most of the works evolve in their own time frame which some people today may find rather extended. The electronic sources and instrumental models of sonic morphology are the lingua franca. There is little use of the voice, text or explosive dramatic gesture. Is this possibly reflective of the socio-psychological conditions of the time? There are a number of keenly crafted works here, if few real surprises. (There are numerous secondary and tertiary references to Stockhausen's work from the 50s and 60s-few from France, and fewer if any from the American or English avant-garde.) The later generation reflects the changes of the eighties: greater contact with other western practices, keyboards, commercial synthesis and processing equipment, improved recording facilities etc. These changes include the attendant listed advantages, and the disadvantages of loss of specific studio identity. Volume Two's works are more evenly divided and reflect a greater diversity of styles, ages and techniques. # of works Date of birth Year of composition 2 1930 - 31 1993 - 94 2 1953 - 54 1989 - 91 2 1961, 63 1991 - 94 1 1972 1991 An apparent dramatic drop in production between 1975 and the late 80s probably reflects problems the (now) Slovak Republic experienced along with other Warsaw Pact countries during the same period-not the least of which was the exodus of younger artists for greener pastures. The surface features and textures of the works on this CD are significantly richer than the first one, and there is strong evidence of a tremedous broadening of personal and artistic horizons through technological developments and wider international contact. Regretably there is no indication of which works employed, and to what extent, the standard European practice of an audio engineer actually executing many of the more 'mechanical' studio activities. (There is an illuminating article from the early-80s by Peter Zinoviev entitled Should Mozart Learn Fortran (?) that relates the range of involvement of various European composers in the actual production of their compositions.) There is no doubt another quality CD set hidden away in the Bratislava archives, and this collection is a clear signal for the Warsaw Studio (co-curated by Josef Patkowski?) to release some CDs of their own 35+ years of materials. The Moscow Studios should not be far behind. Sets such as these (and the RCI 4 CD set on ea in Canada) are invaluable in developing a sense of common history which will inevitably lead to greater depth and more profound ea productions. Definitely these are sets of general ea historical importance for the well-rounded ea practitioner with not a few works that should be considered for public (re-)presentation in North America. A presenter's careful preparation would make multi-speaker sound projection a rewarding experience for all. Kevin Austin Kevin Austin teaches electroacoustics at Concordia University in Montréal. Chat with him almost any day on cecdiscuss@concordia.ca. The Hub - Wreckin' Ball Artifact Recordings The Hub is an amalgamation of six composers/performers - Mark Trayle, Phil Stone, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, John Bischoff, Chris Brown and Tim 'cha-cha' Perkins. Their playground is a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) replete with computer controlled synthesizers and a rather interesting method by which they use them. Each player creates a piece, sends the pure data of the piece to each of the other players, and allows the actual implementation of each piece to be decided upon by the other players. Interestingly enough, the musical sequence of each designed piece left in the hands of the temporary autonomous zone is created by the networking of MIDI systems solely for the purposes of communication. How is this freedom of sequence realized? Each composer-at-play designs a program to make sequential decisions. The deciding outcome rests upon the very act of responding to sequential actions sent into the TAZ. by the other programs or by the live 'performance' of the other players. The subsequent music rises to become an aural metaphor for Heidegger's notion of a broken dialogue between a human individual and any other phenomena at hand (a hammer, another human, etc.). When the 'other' phenomena is no longer ready-to-hand (when it is broken), the individual is able to glimpse - if only for a few brief moments - the authentic meaning inherent as the relationship between I (the individual) and Thou (the other phenomena). This, the Hub's second CD, creates this breaking of relations for the listener, and as such, we can now understand that it is aptly named. John Scott Ressler Tellus 26 Jewel Box and Tellus 27 mini-mall Harvestworks These two discs are part of a series of audio art releases going back to 1984. Both discs are samples of the work sponsored by Harvestworks' Artists in Residence program in New York. Like most compilations, the variety of styles on these discs is intriguing though sometimes disruptive. Tellus 26 Jewel Box features selected works by women artists. Most of the pieces are voice-based, some are narrative, others contemplative. Starting and ending this disc are Blue Harp Study No. 1 and No. 2 by Anne LeBaron, two works for sampled and manipulated prepared harp. This is an improvisatory work. Story Road by Laetitia Sonami is the first part of a recorded live performance for voice and MAX controlled sampler. Navai by Sussan Deihim is an achingly beautiful choral piece mixing Iranian mystical poetry and melodic modes with a western harmonic approach. The effect is seductive and evocative of Bulgarian choral music but less harsh. EO-9066 by Bun Ching Lam refers to the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. It was composed for a choreography by June Watanabe, herself a former internee. Wind sounds lead to sampled voices. A live quartet ends by singing "shikataganai", "it cannot be helped". Smell by Catherine Jauniaux and percussionist Ikue Mori is a rhythmic celebration of wetland smells. Boys Love Baseball by Sapphire is at first a humorous dissection of gender rules and children's literature that quickly falls into a pedophiliac nightmare of incestuous buggery. Yikes! Ruler Etude: A Work In Progress by Mary Ellen Childs is a percussive study of a sampled plastic ruler. Coordinated Universal Time by Michelle Kinney is a deconstruction of the time signal broadcast on shortwave radio and of cold war vigilance. This piece is a requiem, and a meditation on our attempts to control time. Tellus 27 mini-mall contains a cross-ethnic mix of styles, artists and themes. Charlie Ahearn's Ode to Kiki is a haunting song. Hindu in mood, the song's pitches slide into sorrow and resignation. Although melodramatic, the melody pleasingly sticks in the mind. Icebreaker by Ken Montgomery is an excerpt from an installation. Surrounded by speakers, the listener sits in total darkness as this composition, derived from an Ice-O-Matic electric ice crusher, surrounds and penetrates. Music for the King of Thule by Ben Neill is an interactive computer piece originally composed for Carol Szymanski's sculptural instruments. The work is performed on a 'mutantrumpet', it samples Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust, and is constructed around overtones in a 9/8 ratio. This is a slow-paced work. Electric Changgo Permutations by Jin Hi Kim is a bouncingly percussive performance using a sampler, MAX, and instruments derived from Korean traditional instruments. A third of the way into the piece, a clanging and buzzing ensemble takes over evoking the far east of old. In contrast are gamelan-type interludes. In Long Tube Trio by Brenda Hutchinson, the composer sings into a long aluminum tube, concentrating on singing pitches that get modulated by the tube. The resulting sounds are intriguing: vocal, alien, child-like and purely acoustic. Aru Mae ni Naru (Before Being, Becoming) by Kato Hideki follows. This is a short, whispered address to social devolution. Time Piece by Pauline Oliveros and Fanni Green is a vocal work: a tone poem of time-related phrases and a narrative. At almost 12 minutes in duration, this piece feels too long to encourage the state of 'deep listening' the composers invite the listener to enter. It makes me edgy. Paraphrases by Takehisa Kosugi is a piece for tape and live violin, voice and electronic processing including an FM transmitter. Largely an improvisation, this work sounds very formal. Frank Koustrup In Concert Music for the Twenty-first Century Concert Series, Aeolian Hall, April 22/95. London's Aeolian Hall is a venue which most people associate with standard repertoire classical chamber music. The strains of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart are certainly the most likely composers to be heard there on a regular basis. But, on certain occasions, the hall becomes the site for new and interesting music programmed by the Forest City Gallery (FCG). The current FCG Music Series Director for the season is Bentley Jarvis who is a composer well known in the area of electroacoustics. Since this is his field of expertise, it is not a surprise to see him coordinate an adventurous series of concerts exploring this medium. Canada is actually quite a hot-bed for this genre of musical creation. Many of our composers have gone on to win accolades on an international basis. This country also boasts one of the best organizations to support this type of music - The Canadian Electroacoustic Community. In fact, many of the performers in this series are long time members of the CEC. So far, the series has featured the talents of the Vancouver-based performance ensemble Standing Wave, Toronto's Wende Bartley and even a concert by yours truly. The April 22nd concert featured a wide variety of electroacoustic art forms from tape diffusion in the dark to multi-media works. The evening began with the diffusion of 3 compositions featured on the new CEC double compact disc set entitled DISContact! II. Chants of the Apocalypse by Wes Wragget, Christian Calon's En vol and Sarah Peebles' Nocturnal Premonitions were an ideal introduction to the program. Together, these pieces provided a look into the organization of blocks of sonic material which is quite a mainstay for this genre of sound creation. Hurakan, The Heart of Heaven, another work for tape, by Sergio Villareal followed these pieces.The listener was presented with sounds which are a bit more identifiable as 'real' instruments - percussion. From subtle military marches to full-blown tribal rhythms, the beat is the driving force behind this electronic work. Brian Lambert may be best known to many people as a visual artist, but, his musical work has always been equally interesting. In this concert, he was joined by Robert McMurray (guitar) and Peter Lambert (drums) in a musical accompaniment to a video (by Mark Favro and Brian Lambert) and a short film. The True Swimmer is a work based around the dialogue of Burt Lancaster from the film The Swimmer. The voice provides a pivot around which the percussion drives and the sax and guitar inter-mingle. This work was followed by a live performed soundtrack to the surreal single-frame animated film Street of Crocodiles. Again, the trio bend and twist around a central theme in compliment to the visuals. The second half of the program featured the work - both as performer and composer - of trombonist Herb Bayley. It Could be a Dream by Bentley Jarvis incorporated a taped soundscape, slide projections and Bayley on trombone. Silhouetted in front of the projection screen, Bayley seemed to augment an ominous atmosphere of bleak industrialism - a dark vision of the future (or present). The evening concluded with two works by Bayley. Changing Times featured Bayley's trombone triggering electronic sounds to accompany dancer Sonja Khan. The sparse musical portion of the collaboration was complimented by Jarvi's projections covering the area of the dancing movements. It's My Mind and You Can Read It If You Want To finished this program of sounds and visions. Here, Bayley shows the diversity of his talents by composing the backing tape, playing trombone, dancing (with Jody Hall) and making the accompanying video. Certainly a multi-media extravaganza ending to an evening of diverse styles and talents. Chris Meloche This article first appeared in Scene Magazine The Port Pointe-à-Callière Museum of Archeology and History of Montréal, February 9 to April 15, 1995 Harbour Symphony Old Port, Montréal, February 8, 1995. This exhibition was a true multimedia event with sculpture, storytelling, music, video and two harbour symphonies. The theme of the exhibition was the port of Montréal, specifically the interpretations of the port by the artists. Pierre Bourgault was the sculptor. None other than Gilles Vigneault was the storyteller. Helmut Lipski was the composer for the exhibition and the second Harbour Symphony on March 11, 1995. Yves Racicot created the video installations. As well, two originators of the Harbour Symphony idea from Newfoundland, Don Wherry and Paul Steffler, composed the February 8 performance. A Harbour Symphony is music composed for ship horns in a harbour. The first such compositions came out of the biannual Sound Symposium in St. John's, Newfoundland. In the Montréal show the ships were frozen in place and the composers embellished the throaty blasts with church bells and a train locomotive running along the harbourfront. The piece lasted eight minutes. So far I have heard two versions of the work: live from inside one of the ships as I performed my best metronome imitation for the person actually activating the horn, the other from a Radio-Canada DAT recorded from atop the museum's look-out. There are an infinite number of versions you can hear of a Harbour Symphony. Your listening position can dramatically alter the mix. The "concert hall" can be dozens of miles in diameter. What I heard from inside the ship was mostly my own horn plus a few from the closer neighbours. The DAT gave a more balanced mix. The composition, I felt, meandered and wandered during the first five minutes, but the final crescendo, a sustained roar of horns of sheer maritime madness was deeply impressive. Much like in some works by Paul Dolden, the superimposition of sound generated its own universe of harmonics and intensity. Too bad Jericho isn't by the sea; we could have made those walls come tumbling down again! Frank Koustrup
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In Review

CDs

François Bayle - L'Expérience acoustique volumes 5-6
MAGISON, DIFFUSION i MéDIA

The French label Magison, in collaboration with the INA-GRM, has undertaken an ambitious retrospective of the music of one of France's principle electroacousticians, François Bayle. Six volumes of his work have now appeared with another eleven volumes in preparation. Volumes 5-6 present a series of works from 1970-72 entitled L'Expérience Acoustique.

This two hour work (originally planned to last ten hours (!) eventually continued in the 1980's with Son Vitesse-Lumière) consists of five sections, each exploring a different aspect of human perception and communication. L'aventure du cri (The Adventure of the Cry) is the sounds of the emergence of life; Le langage des fleurs (The Language of Flowers) delves into the appearance of things, the "power that certain sounds have"; La preuve par le sens (Proof By Meaning) is a type of listening exercise, eloquent, inquisitive, inviting, yet bewildering in its immensity; L'Épreuve par le son (Proof By Sound) is a twenty-five minute study on a single sound; and finally, La philosphie du non (The Philosophy of No) exploits the "lessons of contradiction", of opposing sound forces and the energy unleashed by their confrontation.

L'Expérience Acoustique is like one of those all-night epic tales one listens to in anticipation for the answer to mysteries one is hardly aware of on a daily basis. This is the flesh and blood of musique concrète. The predominance of electronically-generated sound as opposed to sounds captured from the environment is noteworthy and contrary to what one might come to expect from a seasoned electroacoustic composer of the French school. But these raspy analog timbres take on a vibrant life of their own as Bayle sculpts them in the guise of natural sounds and gestures. Above all, it is the poetic dimension of this art, this careful placing of sounds in time which Bayle has taken such pains to understand and reveal.

Although one would admittedly have to be an aficionado of Bayle's aesthetic to visit some of these works with great frequency, L'Expérience Acoustique is an important audio document, historically, technically and as a testiment to the overall aesthetic panorama of the music of François Bayle. The accompanying 50 page booklet is a wealth of information about Bayle, his ideas and his music and contains some telling photos of the composer in action in the 1970's.

Laurie Radford
Laurie Radford composes instrumental music and ea, and teaches at Concordia and McGill Universities.

Michel Chion - Gloria
Metamkine, DIFFUSION i MéDIA

The most appealing electroacoustic work I have heard recently, Gloria from Michel Chion is an intriguingly layered composition. This is one of the rare works that I listen to repeatedly. It both soothes and disquiets.

Instruments, male and female voices, ambient sounds crossfade and collide contrapuntally. The sounds are largely recognizable because minimally processed. 'Cinema for the ears', the work feels narrative but not obviously. Small town ambiences, accordion, water and echo pull me into the work. After five minutes, upclose gunshots and crunching noises suggest something very wrong. A male character wails in pain "Gloria!..."

This work even has a recurring melody. It floats in, floats by, is sung, is whistled. After sixteen minutes, the seemingly wounded male starts to grotesquely wail his 'glorias', almost funny but not quite.

This work is perplexingly subtle, accessible, moody and challenging, and beautiful.

Frank Koustrup
Frank Koustrup is a composer living in Montréal. He has been instrumental in keeping the CEC office functioning this past year.

Michel Chion - Requiem
empreintes DIGITALes

The twelfth release from empreintes DIGITALes (which now boasts a catalogue of twenty one CD's exemplifying the diversity of the electroacoustic arts) is a collaboration with INA-GRM, and is one of a number of recent projects involving international electroacoustic artists. This disc is of special note since the principal work, Requiem, was first presented on vinyl by INA-GRM in the year of its completion and premiere in 1973.

Chion is a senior French electroacoustic composer and one of the art's principle theoreticians advocating a return to the noncausal principles at the origin of musique concrète, and composes rigorously in this style. He has a large and diverse oeuvre dating back to the sixties including many large scale 'concrete melodramas' such as La tentation de Saint-Antoine and Le Prisonnier du son.

Requiem, based upon the text for the Mass for the Dead, presents an array of 'testimonies' from various voices in ten movements over the course of 37 minutes. The blending and rapid juxtaposition of electronic sounds, environmental soundbites, a myriad of vocal styles and contexts presenting texts heavy with centuries of meaning, Requiem creates a lurching and sometimes startling dramatic course which runs the gamut from the maniacal Sanctus to the transcendantal final movement, Libera Me. The mosaic-like Variations which follow arise from a period of technical studies undertaken by Chion in the late 1980's. Constantly changing blocks of contrasting materials anchored by a short waltz theme, develop into a reflection and "affirmation of the whirlwind of life".

The final work on the disc, Nuit noire, is a visceral example of Chion's monodramatic style. It presents an anonymous moaning and groaning hero who wanders somnabulistically amidst a series of nightmarish dream sequences. Anguish, terror, insanity...a portrait of the depths to which mankind can descend.

Michel Chion's work is musique concrète at its purist and leanest, perhaps also at its most profound.

Laurie Radford

David Eagle and Hope Lee - emotion
New Concert Discs

David Eagle and Hope Lee have pursued their diverse aesthetic visions and musical careers from Montréal to Germany and California to Calgary. On emotion they offer the listener two of each of their works.

Eagle's Solitudes (1990/92) couples a pianist with a MAX-driven computer partner via the Disklavier piano. The result is a virtuosic piano duo in four movements which exhibits a wide variety of approaches to writing for this extended piano. The piece moves fluidly from delicate, filigree clouds of criss-crossing voices to boldly delineated harmonies and registral designs.

Eagle's second work, Traces (1991), combines a flautist performing with a MAX/SampleCell instrument that interprets the live performer's actions and responds with canonic material, variations, new material and in some cases takes the lead as it distills its own unique musical personality from the flautist's input. There is an organic sense to the work, the computer instrument remaining for the most part closely allied to the timbral and gestural language of the flute materials, following it closely, at times spinning a gentle web of voices around the flute, and then near the end of the work, finally establishing its own sonic image.

...I, Laika... (1988-89) for flute, cello, and piano by Hope Lee is adventurous in its instrumental writing and in-triguing in its formal design. A sense of natural develop-ment balanced with both meditative and propulsive tendencies carries the work into many expressive areas over its twenty minute duration. The instruments establish and maintain a distinct individuality and provide three simultaneous perspectives of the same musical journey, rallying together at certain points, at others meeting in conflict.

The final work on the disc, Lee's entend, entend le passé qui marche... (1992) is for piano and tape. A fragile, timeless quality persists throughout this work with the focus delicately alternating between piano and tape materials. The tape part once again takes as its model the extended piano consisting of processed piano recordings with some additional vocal chants. These chants set the hovering, other-worldly tone at the very beginning of the work and return from time to time to subsume the piano in an ethereal resonance.

emotion was produced in collaboration with CBC Calgary and The Banff Centre for the Arts and features performers from the New Works Calgary Ensemble.

Laurie Radford

Gilles Gobeil - La mécaniques des ruptures
empreintes DIGITALes

Winner of this past year's Stockholm Electronic Arts Award and of numerous other international and national prizes over the past decade, Gilles Gobeil has established his refined and singular approach to electroacoustic composition with a growing series of works. This 1994 CD from empreintes DIGITALes brings together eight of his works from the past decade.

The disc begins with Gobeil's most successful work to date, Le Vertige Inconnu (1993), a work that in a sense summarizes the composer's preoccupations found in varying degrees of evolution in the other works on the disc. He uses visceral sound materials that are drawn from machines, industry and the urban environment; fine attention to structural detail where abrupt, screaming sequences of grinding and whining metal are juxtaposed with the relative repose of whirring gears, hissing steam and rich, throbbing drones; and new spatial environments where these industrial voices are given shape, size, and speed as they collide and combine in ever-new trajectories and textures. Le Vertige Inconnu is severe, and of a beautiful purity of design and balance of form and material.

Two works on the disc, Voix Blanche (1988-89) and Là où vont les nuages... (1990-91), utilize the ondes Martenot in combination with tape and additional sources of sound generation and processing via MIDI (in the case of the Là où vont les nuages... ). The ondes is not so much a soloist in these works but rather an equal sonic source contributing to and complementing the materials of the tape part with its crystalline, supple and haunting voice emerging from complex gestural and timbral constructs. It only predominates, like a sole survivor, in the ghostly interludes that hover softly between the main phrases of friction, collision and impending climactic punctuation.

La Ville Machine (1992), "an electroacoustic drama on the subject of sound ecology", is the heart of the disc both by its duration and its breadth of expression. There is an unflagging tension between breathless voices sharing images, nightmares, a mission fraught with confusion and apprehension, immersed in an environment constantly shifting from grotesque urban punctuations to collages of human activity, the seashore, the street, the playground... and the hopeful words of children. There is an urgency to the work and its contents, unsettling, yet optimistic in its unabashed confrontation and its embrace of the very source of the destruction it alludes to: the mechanized city.

Rivage (1986) is perhaps the most blatantly visceral of the works presented here. It clearly reveals Gobeil's early preoccupation with industrial sound materials and formal structures driven forward by the very weight of the sounds they contain. It features a more prominent use of fabricated materials in combination with environmental sources than the later works, but already maintains a darkly pensive character that finds its way into most of the later works.

The earliest work presented on La mécanique des ruptures, Traces (1985) reveals, like Rivage, the seeds of Gobeil's gestural and structural preoccupations: the contrast between highly charged textures and large, quivering spaces inhabited by delicate shimmers of sound and the chirping of natural environments.

The reverse chronological order of the works on the disc takes us from concision and refinement back to a time of searching and discovery. Try reprogramming your CD player and follow the composer's original journey!

Laurie Radford

alcides lanza - New Music from the Americas, 2
Shelan

Several recent CD releases from Shelan productions have highlighted alcides lanza as composer, most notably Trilogy from 1992.

This second release in the New Music from the Americas series focuses upon another aspect of lanza's activities, that of solo performer of works for piano with tape and/or electronics. lanza is an untiring promoter of new works from established as well as young, budding composers and this disc offers the listener a sampling of the repertoire which made up part of his infamous Piano Marathons of 1987 and 1992. The disc combines several Canadian works written for lanza with some older works from North and South American composers he has championed in recent years. The majority of the works are for solo piano with two others combining the piano with tape and one using electronic transformations.

The first work on New Music from the Americas, 2 is a lengthy essay by the Argentinian composer Juan Carlos Paz entitled Música 1946. This is the first recording of this seminal one movement dodecaphonic work which, written in 1946, foreshadowed many of the applications of 12-tone writing to be taken up later by the principle European and American serial composers.

Two short works from 1968 by Bengt Hambraeus, Klockspel and Invenzione 2, offer a glimpse at the unique voice of this prolific composer and demonstrate both lanza's subtle, as well as fiery, keyboard skills.

Several works from the 1970s are included on this compilation. Brazilian Claudio Santoro's Mutationen III (1971) is the most "extended" of all of the works presented on the recording deriving its tape and live materials from both traditional and more adventurous approaches to sounding the piano. The tape and piano materials are closely allied creating a piano duo effect. The focus here is on articulation and timbre, variety and nuance, the rhythmic and dynamic shape of the work floating from distant whispers to thundering cascades.

Another work from the 1970s, Mirrors (1978) for pianist and tape recordist, by the American composer/pianist Richard Bunger, is a long-time lanza favorite with its perpetuum mobile character and its use of tape delay as an integral part of the compositional scheme.

A trio of works from young Canadian composers round out the disc. Brent Lee's Anteriorities (1989) for piano and tape investigates a state of resonance and recall. The piano presents a lingering yet incessant series of harmonies while the tape echoes and projects the timbral essence of the instrument. Of experiential fruit (1988) for solo piano by Micheline Roi alternates an insistent driving character with extended ethereal interludes concentrating on extended piano sonorities. Unfortunately, neither of the two types of music manages to sustain its potential towards a convincing fusion or conclusion. Chris Howard's solo piano piece Chanson d'automne (1989) probes autumnal shades of lyricism, pensive, dark and slow moving. A rigidity of formal design and dodecaphonic language often overpowers these potentially fruitful characteristics

The trilingual program notes of New Music from the Americas, 2 provide a wealth of information about the composers and their music and the disc offers the added listening pleasure of having been recorded with Natural Surround Sound technology. This is a strong addition to the recorded repertoire of twentieth century piano music representing both new Canadian voices and mid-century classics.

Laurie Radford

Alvin Lucier - Clocker
Lovely Music

Alvin Lucier has long been known as a sonic experimenter. Whether he is working with feedback systems (I Am Sitting in a Room) or naturally occurring radio waves (Sferics), Lucier has always produced interesting process pieces.

Clocker is no exception. Here is a work of nearly 45 minutes in duration which consists solely of the sound of a clock ticking. It is the manipulation of this ticking sound which makes the piece an entrancing listen. The composer proceeded with the idea of making a clock speed-up or slow-down by simply concentrating on it. With the aid of a contact mic, digital delay and galvanic skin sensor, the composer has succeeded in creating this illusion.

Almost any attempt to play this work as a piece of background music/noise is generally futile. The listener is most often drawn in to the soundscape of the ticking clock and led away from any other business at hand.

Chris Meloche
Chris Meloche is an electroacoustic artist living in London Ontario. He hosts and produces the weekly radio show Wired for Sound, PO Box 1403 Stn A, London ON N6A 5M2

Daniel McCarthy - ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC
Truemedia Records

A Michigan native, Daniel McCarthy now teaches music at Indiana State University. Music included on this CD represents his electroacoustic works dating from 1989 to 1993.

Works like Concerto for Marimba, Percussion and Synthesizers and TREEBEARD: Ent and Wife present a spontaneous, lively and quirky feel. Sections segue from sombre quiet moments to manic percussive dialogues between live musicians and drum machines.

Musically, the material runs a line stretching from reference points as diverse as Boulez, Zappa and Gentle Giant. An interesting mix, to say the least.

Chris Meloche

Neil B. Rolnick - ElectriCity
O.O. Discs

American composer Neil B. Rolnick's 1992 CD release ElectriCity offers four pieces: an extended chamber music work for instruments and electronics, and three short works for soloist with or without computer-generated tape.

The "title track" ElectriCity (1991), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, synthesizer, sampler, and digital processing is more than forty minutes in duration, and presents fourteen sections of music based on themes of electricity and the music of the Balkans. In actual fact, it is difficult to discern any concrete evidence of these influences in this series of rambling musical statements which are given a clichéd dash of synthesizer flavour from time to time. For a work presented as using the latest in technology by a composer with Rolnick's track record (he teaches electroacoustic and media techniques at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), the extent of the electroacoustic work is disappointing. The electroacoustic sources for the most part take a back seat to the acoustic instruments, adding little splashes of colour here and there, setting up delayed copies of instruments to increase the density of sections, and never veering from a pitch-oriented style except for the sound of a passing truck here and a percussion sample there. The forty minute duration of the work is especially problematic in terms of the overall formal design and shape of the piece. If the fourteen sections of the piece were short works in there own right, one could perhaps credit them for the limited musical world each sets out to explore. After forty minutes of trying to find a convincing shape from section one to fourteen?! The often banal and directionless instrumental writing did nothing to substantiate the situation especially since it represents 95% of the piece.

The shorter solo works are more successful. Wondrous Love (1991) for trombone and computer-generated tape is based on an Appalachian hymn, and features the masterful playing of George Lewis. The computer-generated materials intermingle, lead, follow, accompany and generally provide a convincing counter and complement to Lewis's wide-ranging performance skills.

Blowing (1980) for solo flute is the only work on the disc which does not involve some electroacoustic means. Flautist Robert Dick's ability to extend the timbral and expressive compass of the flute results in a work that in many ways presents a richer palette than the "plugged-in" works on the disc.

The final work on ElectriCity, Ever-Livin' Rhythm (1977) for solo percussion and computer-generated tape, draws its inspiration and musical materials from Ba-Benzele pygmies of central Africa. The vital, lurching rhythms and colours of the percussion part are filled out by the tape materials, extending the timbral registers and contributing some interesting musical ideas of its own. The warbly FM textures and punctuations seem somewhat archaic now, but they serve a strong musical purpose in relation to the percussion materials which ultimately outweighs their timbral shortcomings.

One has such hopes for the wedding of music and the computer. Simply using it as a digital delay unit and as a rudimentary emulator of acoustic timbres hardly satisfies the hopes of not only today but of even a decade ago. Sitting comfortably in the lap of simplicity will never push forward the aspirations of expression.

Laurie Radford

Vivienne Spiteri - comme si l'hydrogène...the desert speaks...
J&W Recordings

This recording displays the excellent and highly virtuosic multidimensional playing of Canada's foremost harpsichordist, Vivienne Spiteri.

High in Canadian content, this contemporary music CD opens impressively with David Keane's Turbo Toccata (1989). The engaging digital sounds are triggered from two TX802 synths activated by a MIDI system. With good forward momentum, this piece is one of the best composed by Keane. Swedish composers Hedman and Karlsson are known in the field of ea for the quality of their production and the singularity of their collaborative approach. Their piece, for amplified harpsichord and computer generated tape, also includes recorded harpsichord sounds. Spiteri's extended techniques include using mallets and other objects, obtaining novel tone-colours by producing harmonics and plucked sounds.

In La Ventana deshabitada (The vacant Window) Argentinean Elsa Justel recorded only the resonance after the onset of the sound and a collection of mechanical noises typical of the instrument. The dialogue between live and recorded parts is animated and poetic, organized as an ever increasing drama, climaxing around four minutes into the piece.

Doubling by Tim Brady is recorded here in a version for harpsichord and reverberation. Straightforward in its formal aspects, the obsessive percussive ideas alternate or overlap with the quasi trill melodic line. A more edgy section follows, with shorter ostinato phrases creating a hesitant mood which abruptly ends on a single chord.

Saariaho, in Jardin secret II ( The secret Garden) fuses the pre-recorded harpsichord with Spiteri's own voice. This expressive work has an intimacy absent in the other works. The sustained tones on the tape contrast with the short-lived sounds of the instrument. A different piece with a different voice!

The desert speaks... (1988), by Bruce Pennycook is for extended harpsichord, computer and MIDI synthesizers. The work is divided into three distinct parts, the last a quasi toccata as a natural answer to the more meditative second section. All actions are triggered by the performer, including the participation of a computer program that surrounds the harpsichord sound with other timbres, echoes performance gestures, and plays back MIDI sequences. A fine performance of a strong musical statement from Pennycook from his ongoing series titled Praescio (the Latin root for "prescience").

The final track is by Canadian Paul Dolden, well known for his 'excessive music'. Here, Spiteri's harpsichord confronts hundreds of digital tracks with instrumental sounds, producing a purely acoustical phenomena which can only take place using electroacoustic technology.

Not much information is given about Jacek Gruzdien. His Turdus musicus (1986), brief, repetitive and described as a virtuoso piece, reminded us of the rhythmic cadence of an Argentinean "malambo". It does not contribute much to the artistic content of this CD.

Since the "documentary" value of recording works like the ones on this CD is undeniable, it is a pity that this J&W compact gives no data concerning composers' nationalities or information which would situate them within the chronology of twentieth century. music. The space given to the obscure elucubrations of Yves M. Larocque in the liner notes could have been used to provide data valuable for researchers. Several of the compositions were written for Spiteri. Credit is given to Eric Johnstone, who developed the MIDI system installed in Spiteri's harpsichord. It was built at the McGill University Electronic Music Studio under the supervision of Bruce Pennycook.

alcides lanza
alcides lanza, Honorary Member of te CEC, composer, pianist, tennis player, father, conductor, promoter of new music, publisher, teacher, director of the McGill University Electronic Music Studio, cyclist, walker, artistic director of GEMS...

Yasunao Tone - Musica Iconologos
Lovely Music Ltd

If you ever thought that music could be completely detached from any tradition... well, this is the disc for you! Compared with other music... experimental, noise, industrial, musique concrète, you name it, this one by Japanese composer and fluxus artist Yasunao Tone is difficult to top. Initially I didn't warm up to this music... until I began to make some feeble connections. In time I recognized phrases, textures and colors. The explanatory notes let me deal with this mechanistic soundscape as a novel sonic experience. I even enjoyed the gentle touch of soft music and the lonely glissando occurring after almost 7 minutes of harsh sounds at the start of Jiao Liao Fruits. The coda of the first piece has grotesque and satirical sounds which explore a wider spectral zone. The second, Solar Eclipse in October, explores similar ideas, modulates effects to extremes, and has a richer field of textures.

Musica Iconologos' (MI) sources were two ancient Chinese texts, whose characters Tone 'interpreted' as photo-images from our visual experience (some are on the CD cover). Reduced to pixel-resolutions they were digitally encoded, so the sounds in MI have a direct relationship with the photos. In the liner notes, composer Robert Ashley says "... in the mythical future (or today) somebody can translate the sounds of this CD back into pictures...". Craig Kendall from McGill University, Montréal - who was in charge of Computer Programming and Digital Sound Processing - says, "... it became obvious that the most effective algorithm to convert a digitized picture into a viable sound file was the X - Y projection method used in the optical character and music recognition fields", (an area of research where McGill staff has excelled).

The generating program was the C language program Projector. The sound files produced were short, being about 20 milliseconds in length. No fewer than 187 scans from the sound sources were used to create all the music. Tone believed these to be the auditory essence of each picture, and he always remained true to his strict methodology, disregarding his personal impressions of the music.

Pitch shifting was applied to certain sounds in an attempt to reflect the phonetic implication of the corresponding spoken Chinese words.

This is a stunning sonic experience... but not for everyone. Try it, perhaps you will hear the phrases, careful control of the stereo image, sudden changes of tonal color and variations in textural density. You will have to be the receiver and a willing one at that. This CD might be out of the ordinary but it has its own intrinsic beauty. Notes, photography and presentation are excellent. Thanks are given to Bruce Pennycook and McGill University, the Electronic Music Studio and Computer Music Lab where the music was created, recorded and mastered.

alcides lanza

Christian Zanési - Grand Bruit
Metamkine, DIFFUSION i MéDIA

Collection Cinéma pour l'oreille, a series of mini-CDs by the French label Metamkine, now numbers nine titles with several others scheduled to appear in the near future. These mini-CDs offer a single electroacoustic work of approximately 20 to 30 minutes in duration by composers such as, among others, Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. One of the most recent release is Grand Bruit by French composer Christian Zanési.

Listeners may already be familiar with Zanési's work on his INA-GRM CD Stop! l'horizon... where his refined brand of musique concrète is strongly represented. Zanési is a student of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel and works closely with François Bayle on the GRM radio broadcasts of electroacoustic music for Musique France. This distinquished lineage is apparent throughout his work in the attention to formal and sonic detail.

Grand Bruit, written in 1990 at the studios of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris and remixed in 1994, is a large musique concrète work based upon that mainstay of electroacoustic resources, the train, and in particular, the R.E.R. which shuttles workers back and forth from Paris to its suburbs. From a single recording of the train's journey through eight different stations, Zanési deftly draws out melodies, rhythms and harmonies adding touches of other material to create a fascinating poetic abstraction, an "interior" voyage where the noise of the rails, forty years after Schaeffer's Étude aux chemins de fer, is still the catalyst for both physical and philosophical travels.

Laurie Radford

Elektroakustická hudba - Vol. 1 and 2
Experimental Studios of Slovak Radio, Bratislava

These sets of discs (Volume One is 2 CDs, Volume Two is 1 CD) provide a cross-section of the work to come out of the Experimental Studio of Slovak Radio, Bratislava, from 1966 to 1994. The release of these 19 ea works results from the collapse of the communist governments in eastern Europe, which had marginalized ea production, and the relatively low cost (per minute) for the production and distribution of ea works in the CD format.

The center of gravity of the first volume are works from between 1967 and 1975. The table below shows the relationship between the composers' date of birth and the year of composition.


# of works   Date of birth   Year of composition

8            1930 - 37       1967 - 75

1            1943            1982

3            1953 - 55       1987 - 91

The styles of the first group fall largely within the 'analog electronics with concrete transformation' school of the German/Eastern European school of the 70s, combined with the inherent technical limitations of those studios. Not having to (or in some cases being able to) 'please an audience' most of the works evolve in their own time frame which some people today may find rather extended. The electronic sources and instrumental models of sonic morphology are the lingua franca. There is little use of the voice, text or explosive dramatic gesture. Is this possibly reflective of the socio-psychological conditions of the time? There are a number of keenly crafted works here, if few real surprises. (There are numerous secondary and tertiary references to Stockhausen's work from the 50s and 60s-few from France, and fewer if any from the American or English avant-garde.)

The later generation reflects the changes of the eighties: greater contact with other western practices, keyboards, commercial synthesis and processing equipment, improved recording facilities etc. These changes include the attendant listed advantages, and the disadvantages of loss of specific studio identity.

Volume Two's works are more evenly divided and reflect a greater diversity of styles, ages and techniques.


# of works   Date of birth   Year of composition

2            1930 - 31       1993 - 94

2            1953 - 54       1989 - 91

2            1961, 63        1991 - 94

1            1972            1991

An apparent dramatic drop in production between 1975 and the late 80s probably reflects problems the (now) Slovak Republic experienced along with other Warsaw Pact countries during the same period-not the least of which was the exodus of younger artists for greener pastures.

The surface features and textures of the works on this CD are significantly richer than the first one, and there is strong evidence of a tremedous broadening of personal and artistic horizons through technological developments and wider international contact.

Regretably there is no indication of which works employed, and to what extent, the standard European practice of an audio engineer actually executing many of the more 'mechanical' studio activities. (There is an illuminating article from the early-80s by Peter Zinoviev entitled Should Mozart Learn Fortran (?) that relates the range of involvement of various European composers in the actual production of their compositions.)

There is no doubt another quality CD set hidden away in the Bratislava archives, and this collection is a clear signal for the Warsaw Studio (co-curated by Josef Patkowski?) to release some CDs of their own 35+ years of materials. The Moscow Studios should not be far behind. Sets such as these (and the RCI 4 CD set on ea in Canada) are invaluable in developing a sense of common history which will inevitably lead to greater depth and more profound ea productions.

Definitely these are sets of general ea historical importance for the well-rounded ea practitioner with not a few works that should be considered for public (re-)presentation in North America. A presenter's careful preparation would make multi-speaker sound projection a rewarding experience for all.

Kevin Austin
Kevin Austin teaches electroacoustics at Concordia University in Montréal. Chat with him almost any day on cecdiscuss@concordia.ca.

The Hub - Wreckin' Ball
Artifact Recordings

The Hub is an amalgamation of six composers/performers - Mark Trayle, Phil Stone, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, John Bischoff, Chris Brown and Tim 'cha-cha' Perkins. Their playground is a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) replete with computer controlled synthesizers and a rather interesting method by which they use them. Each player creates a piece, sends the pure data of the piece to each of the other players, and allows the actual implementation of each piece to be decided upon by the other players. Interestingly enough, the musical sequence of each designed piece left in the hands of the temporary autonomous zone is created by the networking of MIDI systems solely for the purposes of communication.

How is this freedom of sequence realized? Each composer-at-play designs a program to make sequential decisions. The deciding outcome rests upon the very act of responding to sequential actions sent into the TAZ. by the other programs or by the live 'performance' of the other players.

The subsequent music rises to become an aural metaphor for Heidegger's notion of a broken dialogue between a human individual and any other phenomena at hand (a hammer, another human, etc.). When the 'other' phenomena is no longer ready-to-hand (when it is broken), the individual is able to glimpse - if only for a few brief moments - the authentic meaning inherent as the relationship between I (the individual) and Thou (the other phenomena). This, the Hub's second CD, creates this breaking of relations for the listener, and as such, we can now understand that it is aptly named.

John Scott Ressler
Tellus 26 Jewel Box and Tellus 27 mini-mall
Harvestworks

These two discs are part of a series of audio art releases going back to 1984. Both discs are samples of the work sponsored by Harvestworks' Artists in Residence program in New York. Like most compilations, the variety of styles on these discs is intriguing though sometimes disruptive.

Tellus 26 Jewel Box features selected works by women artists. Most of the pieces are voice-based, some are narrative, others contemplative.

Starting and ending this disc are Blue Harp Study No. 1 and No. 2 by Anne LeBaron, two works for sampled and manipulated prepared harp. This is an improvisatory work.

Story Road by Laetitia Sonami is the first part of a recorded live performance for voice and MAX controlled sampler.

Navai by Sussan Deihim is an achingly beautiful choral piece mixing Iranian mystical poetry and melodic modes with a western harmonic approach. The effect is seductive and evocative of Bulgarian choral music but less harsh.

EO-9066 by Bun Ching Lam refers to the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. It was composed for a choreography by June Watanabe, herself a former internee. Wind sounds lead to sampled voices. A live quartet ends by singing "shikataganai", "it cannot be helped".

Smell by Catherine Jauniaux and percussionist Ikue Mori is a rhythmic celebration of wetland smells.

Boys Love Baseball by Sapphire is at first a humorous dissection of gender rules and children's literature that quickly falls into a pedophiliac nightmare of incestuous buggery. Yikes!

Ruler Etude: A Work In Progress by Mary Ellen Childs is a percussive study of a sampled plastic ruler.

Coordinated Universal Time by Michelle Kinney is a deconstruction of the time signal broadcast on shortwave radio and of cold war vigilance. This piece is a requiem, and a meditation on our attempts to control time.

Tellus 27 mini-mall contains a cross-ethnic mix of styles, artists and themes.

Charlie Ahearn's Ode to Kiki is a haunting song. Hindu in mood, the song's pitches slide into sorrow and resignation. Although melodramatic, the melody pleasingly sticks in the mind.

Icebreaker by Ken Montgomery is an excerpt from an installation. Surrounded by speakers, the listener sits in total darkness as this composition, derived from an Ice-O-Matic electric ice crusher, surrounds and penetrates. Music for the King of Thule by Ben Neill is an interactive computer piece originally composed for Carol Szymanski's sculptural instruments. The work is performed on a 'mutantrumpet', it samples Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust, and is constructed around overtones in a 9/8 ratio. This is a slow-paced work.

Electric Changgo Permutations by Jin Hi Kim is a bouncingly percussive performance using a sampler, MAX, and instruments derived from Korean traditional instruments. A third of the way into the piece, a clanging and buzzing ensemble takes over evoking the far east of old. In contrast are gamelan-type interludes.

In Long Tube Trio by Brenda Hutchinson, the composer sings into a long aluminum tube, concentrating on singing pitches that get modulated by the tube. The resulting sounds are intriguing: vocal, alien, child-like and purely acoustic.

Aru Mae ni Naru (Before Being, Becoming) by Kato Hideki follows. This is a short, whispered address to social devolution.

Time Piece by Pauline Oliveros and Fanni Green is a vocal work: a tone poem of time-related phrases and a narrative. At almost 12 minutes in duration, this piece feels too long to encourage the state of 'deep listening' the composers invite the listener to enter. It makes me edgy.

Paraphrases by Takehisa Kosugi is a piece for tape and live violin, voice and electronic processing including an FM transmitter. Largely an improvisation, this work sounds very formal.

Frank Koustrup

In Concert

Music for the Twenty-first Century
Concert Series, Aeolian Hall, April 22/95.

London's Aeolian Hall is a venue which most people associate with standard repertoire classical chamber music. The strains of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart are certainly the most likely composers to be heard there on a regular basis. But, on certain occasions, the hall becomes the site for new and interesting music programmed by the Forest City Gallery (FCG).

The current FCG Music Series Director for the season is Bentley Jarvis who is a composer well known in the area of electroacoustics. Since this is his field of expertise, it is not a surprise to see him coordinate an adventurous series of concerts exploring this medium.

Canada is actually quite a hot-bed for this genre of musical creation. Many of our composers have gone on to win accolades on an international basis. This country also boasts one of the best organizations to support this type of music - The Canadian Electroacoustic Community. In fact, many of the performers in this series are long time members of the CEC.

So far, the series has featured the talents of the Vancouver-based performance ensemble Standing Wave, Toronto's Wende Bartley and even a concert by yours truly.

The April 22nd concert featured a wide variety of electroacoustic art forms from tape diffusion in the dark to multi-media works. The evening began with the diffusion of 3 compositions featured on the new CEC double compact disc set entitled DISContact! II. Chants of the Apocalypse by Wes Wragget, Christian Calon's En vol and Sarah Peebles' Nocturnal Premonitions were an ideal introduction to the program. Together, these pieces provided a look into the organization of blocks of sonic material which is quite a mainstay for this genre of sound creation.

Hurakan, The Heart of Heaven, another work for tape, by Sergio Villareal followed these pieces.The listener was presented with sounds which are a bit more identifiable as 'real' instruments - percussion. From subtle military marches to full-blown tribal rhythms, the beat is the driving force behind this electronic work.

Brian Lambert may be best known to many people as a visual artist, but, his musical work has always been equally interesting. In this concert, he was joined by Robert McMurray (guitar) and Peter Lambert (drums) in a musical accompaniment to a video (by Mark Favro and Brian Lambert) and a short film. The True Swimmer is a work based around the dialogue of Burt Lancaster from the film The Swimmer. The voice provides a pivot around which the percussion drives and the sax and guitar inter-mingle. This work was followed by a live performed soundtrack to the surreal single-frame animated film Street of Crocodiles. Again, the trio bend and twist around a central theme in compliment to the visuals.

The second half of the program featured the work - both as performer and composer - of trombonist Herb Bayley. It Could be a Dream by Bentley Jarvis incorporated a taped soundscape, slide projections and Bayley on trombone. Silhouetted in front of the projection screen, Bayley seemed to augment an ominous atmosphere of bleak industrialism - a dark vision of the future (or present).

The evening concluded with two works by Bayley. Changing Times featured Bayley's trombone triggering electronic sounds to accompany dancer Sonja Khan. The sparse musical portion of the collaboration was complimented by Jarvi's projections covering the area of the dancing movements.

It's My Mind and You Can Read It If You Want To finished this program of sounds and visions. Here, Bayley shows the diversity of his talents by composing the backing tape, playing trombone, dancing (with Jody Hall) and making the accompanying video. Certainly a multi-media extravaganza ending to an evening of diverse styles and talents.

Chris Meloche
This article first appeared in Scene Magazine

The Port
Pointe-à-Callière Museum of Archeology and History of Montréal, February 9 to April 15, 1995
Harbour Symphony
Old Port, Montréal, February 8, 1995.

This exhibition was a true multimedia event with sculpture, storytelling, music, video and two harbour symphonies. The theme of the exhibition was the port of Montréal, specifically the interpretations of the port by the artists. Pierre Bourgault was the sculptor. None other than Gilles Vigneault was the storyteller. Helmut Lipski was the composer for the exhibition and the second Harbour Symphony on March 11, 1995. Yves Racicot created the video installations. As well, two originators of the Harbour Symphony idea from Newfoundland, Don Wherry and Paul Steffler, composed the February 8 performance.

A Harbour Symphony is music composed for ship horns in a harbour. The first such compositions came out of the biannual Sound Symposium in St. John's, Newfoundland. In the Montréal show the ships were frozen in place and the composers embellished the throaty blasts with church bells and a train locomotive running along the harbourfront. The piece lasted eight minutes. So far I have heard two versions of the work: live from inside one of the ships as I performed my best metronome imitation for the person actually activating the horn, the other from a Radio-Canada DAT recorded from atop the museum's look-out. There are an infinite number of versions you can hear of a Harbour Symphony. Your listening position can dramatically alter the mix. The "concert hall" can be dozens of miles in diameter. What I heard from inside the ship was mostly my own horn plus a few from the closer neighbours. The DAT gave a more balanced mix. The composition, I felt, meandered and wandered during the first five minutes, but the final crescendo, a sustained roar of horns of sheer maritime madness was deeply impressive. Much like in some works by Paul Dolden, the superimposition of sound generated its own universe of harmonics and intensity. Too bad Jericho isn't by the sea; we could have made those walls come tumbling down again!

Frank Koustrup

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