Works » By Title » B » … black it stood as night (14:15 / 1985)

This piece is a tape solo version of “The Other Shape” for one percussionist and tape. The composition of this work was mainly based on antinomies. Between the short and the long, for instance; brief and resonant sounds; dry and reverberated, or stretched; the continuity of silence or sustained tones, opposed to the brutal and ephemeral explosion of percussive sounds, etc. As in many other works, this dialectic had brought me to a typically segmented, plain and punctuated form. These antithetical elements are less obvious in the present version, essentially because of the absence of the parts played by the percussionist in the original piece. The form is thus less clearly outlined. Certain elements, and entire sections, are suppressed; some elements are displaced. The exposition order is recomposed in another perspective, and the realization of a tighter and enhanced mixdown accounts for the specific requirements of a tape solo. A large majority of sonorities proceed from recordings of percussive instruments. They are used as “natural”, or diversely transformed (timbre colorations, cynamic modulations, time stretchings, reverberations, etc.). Continuous textures are composed of sustained timbres suggesting certain percussion groups (woods, drums, metals, and bells). Towards the end of the piece brutal explosions of raw energy, evolving into rhythms, are the sole elements which could be considered totally extraneous to this world of instrumental percussion; but they nevertheless assert the same essences; explosive impact, resonance and rhythm. DL