Another release in the “Unlimited” series (therefore free): an album dvoted to Lithuanian/Polish electroacoustician Arturas BumÅ¡teinas. Four pieces for instrument and tape: one for tuba, one for violin, one for violin and viola, and one for guitar and accordion. Nice plurisemantic writing. “Dough” (17 minutes) is very well done. The whole thing is rather ambient, though without any post-rock or post-classical velleities. Convincing. And free.
via Monsieur Délire
Ausgangspunkt des Stücke dieses Albums ist der Klang von Stimmgabeln, deren sinusnahe Töne moderne Elektronik assoziieren und die doch gleichzeitig in der westlichen Musik tief verwurzelte, fast archaische Werkzeuge sind. Bernier hat zunächst Aufnahmen dieser Töne melodisch arrangiert, dann umspielen lassen von einem Duo aus Viola da Gamba und Violine, ihrerseits konzentriert auf lineare Schichtung, auf den Instrumentalklang selbst. So angenehm die zwischen alt und neu vermittelnde Musik ins Ohr geht, so schwer greifbar bleibt sie jedoch auch, denn Bernier fährt an Erweiterungen seines an sich strengen Konzepts allerhand auf, was sich an elektroakustischer Garnierung einfügt, schlichtes Kontaktmikroknistern und blechernes Klappern unbekannter Herkunft, auch virtuose Klangverschneidung, in der Streicher und Stimmgabeln zu Glocken und Synthesizern mutieren. Nie geht es jedoch entschlossen in eine Richtung, die einzelnen Fasern krümeln sich zunehmend in eine beredte und doch leere Melancholie hinein, die das Ohr ermüdet, und es ist ein bisschen schade um den Aufwand.
Créées entre 2008 et 2010, les 5 pièces qui composent strings.lines sont de Nicolas Bernier. Compositeur canadien, entouré de Pierre Yves Martel et Chris Bartos, livre 5 lignes ou 5 diagonales entre passé et présent ou entre viole de bambe/violon et électronique. Une musique instrumentale et minimale gorgée de micro-sons, d’infimes résonances… Une musique traditionnelle moderne nécessaire et douce.
via Polychromic
Episode 29 of Futurónica, a broadcast in Rádio Zero (every two weeks, on Friday nights, repeating on Tuesdays at 01h) airs tomorrow, February 25th at 21h (GMT).
The playlist for Futurónica #29 is:
You can hear Rádio Zero’s broadcasts at radiozero.pt/ouvir.
Composed by Miguel Carvalhais & Pedro Tudela in Porto, 2009-2010, except “78†with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay in 2010.
“Homem Fantasma†presents three new compositions that steer @c’s work into new domains of audial exploration.
@c’s music is about complexity, dispersal, multiplicity and active listening. It’s about the complexity of what is in the music, what is not, and what may be filled in by the listener’s brain. Dispersal and multiplicity walk hand in hand in these pieces, created by a (sometimes staggering but never overtly evident) layering effect, through the composition of rich and complex soundscapes that challenge the listener to focus on single threads while inevitably reserving parallel sequences to be discovered on later hearings. Multiple viewpoints enrich the compositions with the struggle and balance between (dis)concordant strains of sound that create multiple perspectives, varied departure and landing points for a listening experience that is never facilitated and nothing short of challenging.
The length of the compositions is dilated, to allow the listener to re-enter the same piece consecutively, developing multiple and varied listening experiences during its running time. False-starts or pauses are used as markers for this traversal, dragging one out of the continuum just to plunge back into it.
@c’s music is constructed. After the initial sound building, the exploratory work from which the basic elements are created, they proceed to a layering stage, where sounds are arranged in order to build the unified whole. This music is not hermetic or gratuitously difficult, much on the contrary. As complex as these constructions may be, and as far as they may stand from easily categorizable format or straightforward descriptions, they are able to generate immediate and strong aesthetic reactions, leaving strong and lasting impressions on listeners. But they do demand attention, interpretation and scrutiny of the nuances and details of the pieces.
The three compositions in “Homem Fantasma†were created during a period of almost two years. They were slowly chiseled and refined, they integrated bits and pieces of chance encounters, mishaps, dérives, and contaminations, emerging from the meeting of multiple forces, semantic contexts and actions. Field recordings and found sounds, a very important part of the sound palette, bring with them recognizable (although vaguely alien) timbres and textures, but @c’s music is also built from segments of live recordings and studio recordings, processes and experiences that are collated in the compositions.
Besides being an homage of sorts, the title of this release originates from the ghostliness of computational music and the immateriality of the musician’s role in its creation and performance, their simultaneous presence, immanence, and absence from the music. This is @c’s first release in Crónica’s Unlimited series of freely downloadable editions.
You can download “Homem Fantasma†as high-quality MP3 or Apple Lossless files directly from Crónica and free of charge. Donations are welcome! :)
“Pastoral†from Arturas Bumsteinas the latest release on the portuguese Crónica label starts off quite eerie. A haunting piece called “Boletus Satanas†offers exactly what the title suggests: A sonic exploration that oscillates between field recordings, shamanic rituals and drones forming a dark and brooding sound monolith. Voices whisper and mumble in the background, slowed down noises echo left and right, while woodwind and brass instruments resonant and swell in a constant stream.
Dough, the second track, presents itself in a lighter mood. Situated somehwere between textural works in the vein of La Monte Young and early free jazz recordings, Dough is a live recording of a small ensemble – disjointed rhythms flicker in the background, strings clash against eather other forming dissonant clusters.Although being based on samples, the third piece titled “Violin, Viola & Untitled†sounds more like an early study in synthesized sounds. Whirring tones, beating harmonics shifting against each other forming a dense textural cloud.
After those three intense pieces, Bumsteinas closes the album with a soothing meandering 24 minutes long drone track that ventures along beautiful harmonics and provides a perfect counterpoint to the more intense first half of the album.
At first “Pastoral†might seem to lack a little structure or direction, but the different approaches complement each quite well making Pastoral a really stunning work. Arturas Bumsteinas’ “Pastoral†is a brillant joyride through various themes of modern and post modern music ranging from drone works and ensemble recordings to dense atonal textures. As usual Crónica doesn’t disappoint and releases a great album that shows how important well curated labels are. Given the fact that this release is available for free and for donation, this shouldn’t be missing in any record collection.
via Resonant Strata
Michael Delia and Simon Whetham collaborative performance recorded at the Školská 28 gallery space in Prague Saturday 20th November 2010.
Simon Whetham was invited to perform at Školská 28, Prague, on 20th November 2010. In addition to playing his signature solo field recording composition, using only recordings captured in Prague in the week preceding the concert, he also requested to be introduced to local musicians in order to collaborate and improvise with them. Miloš Vojtěchovský, Director of Školská 28 put Simon in contact with US artist and sometime Prague resident Michael Delia.
After a brief meeting and an exchange of CD’s they played an improvised collaborative set, Michael playing various instruments through effects and Simon playing field recordings and processing some of Michael’s sounds.
Le travail de Nicolas Bernier se situe aux confins de l’expérience électronique et des limites acoustiques, là où la résonance électroacoustique des sons induit généralement des frontières sonores floues, des lignes de rencontres fascinantes, et des jeux de perceptions le plus souvent altérées par le caractère ténu ou microtonal des fréquences explorées. Pour strings.lines, le musicien s’est appuyé sur la superposition de couches sonores procédant d’une double expérience: une série de sons, enregistrés à partir des résonances sinusoïdales de diapasons ainsi que de la captation de drones de violon et de viole de gambe interprétées par Pierre-Yves Martel et Chris Bartos. Laissant libre cours aux deux instrumentistes dans leur approche méditative mais aussi mécanique de la sensibilité tonale de leur instrument (à travers le jeu sur le bois notamment), Nicolas Bernier procède ensuite à diverses manipulations digitales afin de façonner un objet sonore unique et intrigant, réunissant dans des sensibilités partagées le digital et l+instrumental. Une expérience sonore mais aussi méditative. Laurent Catala
Nicolas Bernier’s passion for sound and for beautiful and intricate structures earned him a honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica two years ago for his debut album, Les Arbres. This record was in no way Bernier’s first foray onto the music scene, but until then, his work has mainly constituted of collaborative efforts and of installations. With three releases out in a matter of months, Bernier charts very different aspects of his electro-acoustic work.
Bernier uses a wide range of sonic sources in his work, which are often processed into fragile clusters and placed against acoustic instrumentation. In the series of recordings he has made with guitarist Simon Trottier, Bernier has absorbed elements of folk music and distorted them as to retain only the slightest traces of melody, and surrounded them with noise, interferences and field recordings. Courant.Air, published on Ahornfelder, sees the pair working together once again. Recorded over a two year period, and the result of two distinct commissioned work, this album is partly a tribute to the St. Lawrence River which has played such an important part in Canadian history and which has shaped both the landscapes it crosses and the people who depend on it. The extremely intricate and detailed soundscapes collected here occasionally contrast with Trottier’s gentle guitar work, his contribution at times left to flourish amidst stark and fragmented sound collages (Soubresauts, Petit Port Bien Abrité, Air.Chanson.Usure, Propulsion), at others processed and assimilated into Bernier’s epic creations. There is a constant shift here between dense electro-acoustic moments and more pastoral motifs, but the pair ultimately feed from one another, allowing the music to filter through Bernier’s abstract constructions just enough to ground it firmly.
Released a couple of months before Courant.Air, Strings.Lines, issued on Portuguese imprint Crónica, is a very different project. Recorded with Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba) and Chris Bartos (violin), the album is centered around Bernier’s fascination for tuning forks, which he avidly collects, and the variations in frequency they can reach. Having sourced the sounds emitted by his tuning forks, Bernier set out to process them into improvised sound formations. In a second instance, Martel and Bartos were asked to play close to a single pitch, and use the whole of their instruments, including bodies, bows and strings to build additional musical layers as a response to Bernier’s earlier work. While melodies are largely dropped in favour of the sonic aspect of the instruments, there is greater musicality to be found in the five pieces making this album, albeit in drone forms for the most part. Toward the end of Line (C) however, Bernier builds up a clearly defined rhythmic pattern, giving the piece a surprisingly conventional outline for a moment. Line (Horizon) which follows, resorts to the sombre sound forms created by the two string players, at a time combining the increasingly threatening hum of the strings and various textured field recordings into a particularly dense soundscape before leaving it to dissolve over the later part of the piece.
Bernier is sole on board for the LP-only Usure.Paysage, the most recent of the three albums, and, over the course of four tracks, two clocking at around ten to eleven minutes, the other two much shorter, he exposes the electro-acoustic nature of his work through a series of highly fragmented and contrasted sound collages, built from varied field recordings. This is in many ways the most disturbing and fascinating of the three records, its pieces building up into heavy abstract forms, cut short by far ranging noise conflagrations or infinitely small sonic particles. Each of the four pieces is made of juxtaposed sequences, with nothing to clearly link them together other than the simple fact that they exist in a pre-defined order. The impression though is that of a living scenery, subjected to random events, and reacting or adapting to them. Bernier expertly plays with the mind here, often tricking it into a false sense of safety and peace, only to drop a deep thunder or layer high pitched metal on metal friction or, it appears at one point, human screams.
Although released in quick successions, these three records stem from totally different ideas, the resulting pieces, while bearing some common elements, revealing Nicolas Bernier as a particularly inquisitive mind and creative sound artist.
Cronica celebrates their 50th release with L, a compilation pairing 18 Cronica artists into collaborations. This results in 9 new compositions, exploring various facets of the label’s approach to hazy, electro-acoustic sound art.
While it’s difficult to pin Cronica down to a distinct sound, the artists here chiefly work in drones, in which field recording plays a significant part. And the quality is high throughout, from the motorised whine and static pops of Gilles Aubry and Paulo Raposo’s ‘Forms of Suspension’ through to the floor-shaking low-end rumble of Pure and Duran Vazquez’ aptly titled ‘Stoorm’.. Marc Behrens and Cem Guney employ an industrial grind, dappled in random clicks and glitch in ‘Mouth to Mouse’. Ran Slavin and Vitor Joaquim’s ‘Voices Over Water’ is predictably aquatic, waves of bass lapping against reverberant clanging and submerged voices.
Both Janek Schaeffer and Stephan Mathieu’s collaborations, with Enrico Coniglio and Piotr Kurek respectively, explore sounds familiar from their own collaboration Hidden Name, all rich, billowing synthetic drones, but they’re just out-blissed by bucolic closer ‘Reve General’ by The Beautiful Schizophrenic and Tu’M. Best of all though is Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello’s ‘Circles of Twine’, a gorgeous evocation of a sub-tropical setting, sparse piano laid over the chirrup of birds and insects, cloaked in a dank forest glow. All great tracks. Joshua Meggitt
via Cyclic Defrost
