Francisco López - La Selva (1998)

"La Selva is an immersion into the sound environments of a tropical rain forest in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica. An astonishing natural sonic web created by a multitude of sounds from rain, waterfalls, insects, frogs, birds, mammals and even plants, through a day cycle during the rainy season. A powerful acousmatic broad-band sound environment of thrilling complexity. And above all, a tour de force of profound listening".

Much against a widespread current trend in sound art and the customary standard in nature recordings, I believe in the possibility of a profound, pure, 'blind' listening of sounds, freed (as much as possible) of procedural, contextual or intentional levels of reference. What is more important, I conceive this as an ideal form of transcendental listening that doesn't deny all that is outside the sounds but explores and affirms all that is inside them. This purist, absolute conception is an attempt at fighting against the dissipation of this inner world.



[From the liner notes of the CD “La Selva. Sound environments from a Neotropical rain forest” (released by V2, The Netherlands).
Extracted and modified version of parts of the in-progress larger essay “The dissipation of music”]

+ info about La Selva @ http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html

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track 1 _ 1:10:50''

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Lionel Marchetti - Portrait d'un Glacier (Alpes 2173m) (2001)

"Some of the best concrète, environmental works you could hear, weaved location recordings I guess from the Alpes, adorned with sound sources that come from far away to the left or right occasionally. You are always traveling, there's always movement, seamlessly, calmly, not sudden switches of environment, but a steady flow of change and new characterization. I like the use of one time sounds that don't get repeated. You want to click back and hear it again but then some other current scenario is making your mind work by then. These works are great, not since some of the best Eric La Casa or the Liminality comp have I been transported so completely. The wind, the crunch of snow underfoot, the bent branches left behind, the far away hail of a fellow trekker." ~ Manifold Records

Lionel Marchetti has blended field recordings with electronic drones and other sounds to create an incredibly dramatic recording. Recorded on the Glacier de Tré-la tête on Mont-Blanc, in France, at an altitude of 2173 meters we hear low rumbles, creaking, water splashing and sounds of footsteps crunching the icy surface all appearing out of the silence. Voices in the distance...a small propeller rescue plane overhead?

"Portrait d'un Glacier is a Series I release which puts it in Ground Fault's quiet category. While most of the CD is relatively quiet, there are moments at the middle when things get a little nerve wracking. It's very cold, dark and dramatic.

This is one of those CDs that are great to drift asleep to in a darkened room only to be awaken by the sudden "events" that occasionally happen.

"I used to hike mountains, (the Alpes), and the first time I descovered the Glacier "Tré-la tête", on Mont-Blanc, in France, with my friend Bruno Roche, I realized that we met a strange "vivacity". This glacier is coverd with stones, on 5 "kilometres" at less. It's a sort of desert where it's possible to see, on the floor, near our feet, a strange blue eye looking at us, saying : - do you want to know more about my face ?"...

In "Portrait d'un glacier (Alpes, 2173m)", I tried to find beauty of the mountain when it is able to give us an incredible geomorphic entity as the glacier; I tried to represent the breath of who is walking in a such beauty, dealing, in that way, with more than only his human condition - "the most difficult area"; but without forgetting this idea of "panic" I can feel that the mountain is danger too, an archaism I can feel under my feet, and sometimes could destruct me only with a breath..." Lionel Marchetti

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Glacier de Tré-la tête (2173m)

Ce matin, réveillé vers cinq heures

couleurs métalliques et vertes
lumière, force
tournoiement de l'esprit projeté
psychisme, sécrétion
lente humeur animale

soudain sonore

aurore en montagne

intelligence.

L.M.

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Track 1 - Portrait d'un Glacier (Alpes 2173m)..........28'40"

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Natasha Barrett - Isostasie (2002)

"Not so long ago, electronic music was the province of those lucky enough to be able to gain access into the squeaky clean labs of IRCAM or similar institutions, where large, impossibly expensive boxes festooned with dials and flashing lights awaited the bidding of the composer. Now that a similar level of wizardry is achievable with just the aid of a laptop, and contemporary electronica made in bedrooms all over the world enjoys cutting edge status, it's tempting to wonder what the point of 'classical' electronic music actually is. Records like this one may be the answer...

A graduate of Jonty Harrison's B.E.A.S.T. project, Natasha Barrett's approach is highly rigorous, borne of compositional rather than improvisational process. Though on paper her methods can seem a little dry, her music is possessed of an overtly sensual and often awesome power that rivals anything else you're likely to hear. Her 'acousmatic' techniques transform field recordings, percussion and voices into restless soundscapes that conjure up strange geographies buffetted by even stranger meteorological phenomena, cosmic forces on a massive scale or hallucinatory rainforests straight out of J.G Ballard.

Barrett's structural precision gives her pieces a strong sense of narrative as well as place. Tiny sonic fictions unravel throughout; footsteps recede over glassy, gong like tones. A door is opened, a cat enters, draws near, purrs and eats from a bowl seemingly placed in your left ear. You're dragged through dense undergrowth packed with insects, or sat in a dripping cave listening to distant machines devouring the landscape. But most of all it's her control of timbre that catches the ear again and again.

At times during the opening "Three Fictions" the immersion factor almost sent me into some deep alpha state, or the abstract sweep of millions of tiny oscillations produced such strange sensations in the small of my back I had to take my headphones off to catch my breath. One of Barrett's interests is in manipulating the listener's perception of time, and it's something she does with consummate ease.

Lush, disturbing and beautiful all at once, Isostasie at once connects with the rich and strange concoctions of classic musique concrete, coupled with a timeless quality lacking in the ephemeral world of contemporary electronica. Stunning."

by Peter Marsh, in BBC experimental review, January 2003

"A former student of Jonty Harrison and Denis Smalley — two important figures of the British electroacoustics school — Natasha Barrett integrates the approach of these two composers into a proposition which recalls both sound ecology and properly abstract composition. Isostasie is full of these poetic, disconcerting environments, impressionistic pictures of various formats, evocative of her country of adoption, Norway. In this CD, one will encounter various meteorological happenings, the midnight sun, Red Snow (a phenomenon due to the growth of algae or diatoms), as well as an ode to the forest, Viva la Selva!. Plenty of illustrations and impressions of the Norwegian landscape, postfaced with an «exploration of spatial musical structure» (The Utility of Space), all fabricated with utmost delicacy by a young composer with an attuned ear, of whom this is the third album already (following two self-produced CDs, Rocks & Wraiths and Chillies & Shells.)"

in electrocd website

Isostasie (empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 0262 | 2002)

Three Fictions (Northern Mix) (2000) 10'34''
1. In the Rain 3'51''
2. Midnight Sun: Midday Moon 3'35''
3. Outside Snow Falls 3'02''

Displaced:Replaced (2001)
4. Fog, light wind 2'46''

5. Red Snow (2001) 15'39''

Displaced : Replaced (2001)

6. Wet and gusty 1'42''

7. Viva la selva (1999) 17'28''

Displaced : Replaced (2001)

8. Gathering wind 2'50''

9. The Utility of Space (2000) 13'25''

10. Industrial Revelations (2001) 11'32''

total duration: 76'41'

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(note: track 8 is in the first folder for uploading space optimization)

Iancu Dumitrescu - Pierres Sacrees / Harryphonies / Grande Ourse (1983 - 1991)

Pierres Sacrées (1991) 17'25''
[pour pianos préparés, plaques et objets métalliques]

Harryphonies (alpha) (1985) 18'10''
[pour contrebasse solo et ensemble]

Grande Ourse (1983) 15'30''
[pour deux bassons, piano préparé, percussion et bande]

Harryphonies (epsilon) (1986) 19'00''
[pour contrebasse solo et ensemble]

(all music composed by Iancu Dumitrescu and performed by the Ensemble Hyperion, except Harryphonies (epsilon) performed by RTV [Orchestre National de Romaine], directed by Losif Conta)

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"Iancu Dumitrescu's music is spectral, is electroacoustic, but above all is a coherent totality grounded in a different conception. Of all living composers, Dumitrescu is the one who has most exploded sound. Dumitrescu's work is a negation, from the depths, of everything in contemporary music symptomatic of distraction, of banalization, and of a radical loss of purpose. His music is not a new convolution in the knot of modern music, but an unravelling of the curse.

Dumitrescu, composer, conductor and musicologist, was born in Romania in 1944. From the age of seven to twenty-two, he pursued conventional musical studies leading to an M.A. in Composition at the National Conservatoire in Bucharest. Towards the end of this period he met Alfred Mendelsohn, who introduced him to the music - then forbidden in Romania - of Schoenberg and Webern. A slight liberalisation of the regime beginning in 1968 catalysed a move towards more personal work amongst a group of composers that included Dumitrescu, Niculescu, Stroe, Vieru, and Olah. In 1973, Dumitrescu met Sergiu Celibidache, who made a profound impression on him and who introduced him to application of Husserlian phenomenology to music. In 1976, Dumitrescu founded the Hyperion Ensemble. With Ana-Maria Avram, he set up the Edition Modern record label in 1990.

Q: One of the first pieces I heard was Pierres Sacrées; I was very struck - as were many other people - by the sound of this music. It seemed quite unlike the usual sound of contemporary composed music. It had far more distortion, noise and violence. There seemed to be a shift away from stable fundamental frequencies, and a greater emphasis on the unstable aspects of sound. Do these characteristics of the sound have a special significance in your musical thinking?

D: First of all, you are quite right to say that there is this distortion, and secondly, it is absolutely deliberate. I myself was in a way surprised by it. When it first came - and during the development of this piece Pierres Sacrées there was a brief but intense period of experimentation out of which came this new sound - I wondered from what part of myself it had come. But I also knew that I needed it. You could say that this distortion in the sound comes from the attempt to release or unveil the god that is living in every piece of base matter. Pierres Sacrées placed me not only in the avant garde but also in the avant garde of deliberate and progressive use of distortion as an integral and necessary part of music...

On the technical level it comes from a kind of artisanal production. In Romania we had, and still have, a poverty and lack of equipment as compared with, say, IRCAM in Paris. Evidently - and this is not intended as a criticism - in the West, composers have at their disposal a massive array of technical possibilities. Unfortunately this tends to produce very conventional, very impersonal music. Music demands a process of introversion, of isolation and introspection. You have to go alone into your corner and concentrate. You can't be always looking around at what's happening, with your attention dissipated. But I don't want to say that this technology is inherently bad - simply that it was my fate to be poor."

in: interview from Tim Hodgkinson [AMM] to Iancu Dumitrescu (this article originally appeared in Resonance Volume 6 Number 1).

Negativland - A Big 10-8 Place (1983)

A concrète radio trip through San Francisco, or a surreal travelogue for suburban wastelands everywhere.

Mark Hosler, Ian Allen and David Wills: Conception and Production
David Wills: Narration
Mark's Dad: Whistling

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