1. David Berezan (1967): “Gathering” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
A coniferous creaking of high-rise tree trunks indeed opens the piece, slowly and carefully at first, but with an accelerating intensity which sweeps you up through mountainside brancheries and the core of wood, circling the annual rings, boring into the origin of wood!
Of course the wind that blows through the very nature of wood, the nature of living trees and the essence of these mysterious beings is a wind of shamanistic properties, an upholder of forces unknown but basic to us people and us trees, us beetles and us glowworms! I bow to Indians and Saamis who ask the tree forgiveness before cutting it down for purely necessary purposes, and I pity those still unconscious who cannot see and sense this kinship between all living beings, but regard trees and animals as mere commodities, mere material for greed. Spiritual growth may arise in these poor ones in later lives.
Berezan manages to integrate the acoustic instruments into the eye of the coniferous time-storm in a seamless, completely natural way, and it’s like visioning a little child sitting at the center of existence, playing with a bucket, a spade and a small mound of sand, while the worlds revolve around it. Brilliant! Makes you feel a lot, think a lot.
You know, it might feel like we’re at a standstill, a dead-end or something like that, but we’re really dashing down the existential path at breakneck speed, from life to life, so fast that each individual life just flickers by like flashes of light or shining pearls of a bead passing through some absentminded old-timer’s aged hand… and the velocity of all the flashing lives passing constitutes a certain pitch and timbre, the pitch and timbre of life – and some properties of this piece of music convey that core feeling.

2. Nicolas Borycki (1972): “Le Diable au Teint Orageux” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
The first impression is that of a wounded insect flapping its crystalline wings inside the confinement of a glass jar in Aunt Rose’s larder in the farmhouse kitchen in some rural part of England. It’s a lively but broken feeling of glass and crystal and aged scents. In this musically microscopic view the hurt insect feels like a weakened giant in some fairytale, but the music – or maybe my associations from the music – also makes me think of Rune Lindblad’s caught insects, which he recorded through contact microphones attached to the glass jars in which he temporarily held flies and bumble bees (“Attack 1 – 3”). However, the strictly glassy property of Borycki’s piece naturally throws my thoughts in the direction of earlier glass musicians, like Denis Dufour and Annea Lockwood.
Soon the glass seeps out into that open, fresh, airy expanse that you only experience at an airfield on a light northern June night when all the activity has died down and the Goodjet for France and the Ryanair for England rest their heavy weights like dormant shadows over at the edge of the tarmac. A cool fragrance rises from the crew cut grass by the runway. This music fans out three feet above the ground…
The thunder and the rain that occur only strengthen this restful sense of an airfield night in Scandinavia, when everything is off sleeping, at tarmacs, inside hangars and dorms.
At a certain instance this whole concept is lifted up onto another level of existence, by a kind of warp-speed acceleration, and then you’re suddenly on a theoretical plane, purely spiritual, without the guidance or hindrance of linear time and three-dimensional space. You’re on your own! From this point on all that happens in the music is a spiritual reflection or meditation on the goings-on in the material world, and soon you’re soaring between hovering mirrors full of clouds, while tiny sparse metallic bolts and screws shine and spin all around like in an idea by Marcel Duchamp!
Suddenly it feels like you have an extra day just to enjoy!

3. Christian Bouchard (1968): “tonicité” (1997)

Sonoloco comment:
Even though – as Bouchard explains in his intro above – he presents the raw sound material at the beginning of his piece, it is peculiar how much these truck breaks really do convey the absolute sense of improvised music with a jazz core, even without the slightest manipulation, just live and pure through the fumes and the smell of oil and rubber! This tells something important about the world of sounds around us and our own perception, and it also has a strong bearing on Marcel Duchamp, which I mentioned talking about another piece on this CD, and his ready-mades, or the “found objects” utilized by some, or indeed the “silence” of John Cage, which is roaring with all these sounds that rise and sink around us and inside us! It simply has to do with a shifting of perception, a shifting of attention, a drift of our absent minds!
…and the hinges of absences squeak in the wind of amnesia…

4. jef chippewa: “DUO”

jef@newmusicnotation.com

http://music.concordia.ca/Programs/Electroacoustics/Student_Links/jef/chippewa.html

Sonoloco comment:
The plasticity of bulging lines and protruded chins hint at withheld densities of supercharged oral cavities and the mouth-corner seep-through of tingling, jangling echoes of pillars of golden, dancing away towards distant beyonds, sensed only through the corner of the eye, remaining as faint imprints on the film of recollections, tarnished by years passing in a flash, those jiffy-millennia…
This is an intensely beautiful little garland piece, harboring the seed of a much longer work, wherein the composer could explore further the shiny surfaces of dancing tonal pillars of legendary blue notes, and the multitude of reflections that bounce back and forth between them in the intricate patterns of this finger-tipped mouthpiece music!

5. Yves Gigon: “Crickpet” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
In this music you wake up on a dewy leaf in a mythical meadow, the sounds at first just echoing that enchanted ambience of good deeds and lurking danger, when the leaf you rest on trembles slightly as you shift your position and a drop of clear water looses equilibrium and runs down the stalk, lizard-fast - while in the shadows you feel the presence of fantastic beings, small and big, nowish and thenish, and some even saved for a distant future of white-bearded sages and their ancient tales… and the clarity and intensity of the attention of it all is overwhelming, as if the whole world around you was just eyes and ears, directed at you and you alone! Your thoughts rise like terrific screams inside your head!
Gigon’s craft here is reminiscent of the early style of François Bayle or even Jean-Claude Risset, fondling and caressing helium-light spheres of rainbow sound, filling the meadow like early Macintosh screen-savers!
Trembling, thudding little tremors of echo resemble Tuvinian or Mongolian Jew’s harps, prying open sudden temporary sights of saddle-less horses stampeding across the steppe in an outpour of pure energetic joy.
Even though the piece is so short, it still manages to curve in and out of itself, through an agile rotation of the elbow and a nod towards infinity, gradually letting go of directional control, which is taken over by gravitational forces and their counter-actors… at a razor’s edge between matter and antimatter, where space and time is happening.

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6. Michael Gurevich (1978): “Soft White” (1999)

Chantale Dodier, alto saxophone
Michael Gurevich, computer
Michael Gurevich and May Orebanjo, Recording Engineers

Sonoloco comment:
The female voice (why isn’t the vocalist mentioned in the presentation?) and the alto saxophone make this a rare entry on this CD. At first you have no feeling of manipulation, except a certain layering of the voice – but those are everyday occurrences in much music, so they leave you empty-eyed anyway… - and you peer through floating strands of jazz-smoke and subdued club light, where silhouettes bank left and right like shooting-range targets as your gaze travels on, Miami Vice-like.
The night of June in this music signals light from the north; a peculiarity of northern seasonal geographic assets – and Gurevich’s music falls right in with this grueling night-light eyesight, with blue notes in your fingertips and the sphere of your eye reflecting the light sky of night…

7. Mark J. Hannesson (1968): “Burdizzo” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
A wheezing mist out of the pipes of subterranean conduits soon give way to intense rippling sensations, flowing back and forth with some repetitious rhythmic values.
An accelerating machine-mad episode sounds a little bland and unimaginative to my demanding frames of reference, but then again I yet don’t know about the aim of it.
There is an abruptness in the occurrences an the subsequent disappearances of harsh sounds, seemingly erratically bouncing in and out of view, while, simultaneously, some rhythmic structures are present. This poses a contradiction in the stylistic method, but perhaps this is intentional. Anything is possible, but not everything is artistically viable.
Some interesting stretchy impressions are achieved by allotting different layers of sound individual speeds, but the sonority is still too poor for me. It’s not that I demand many sounds or thick sounds; I enjoy sparse, thin, ascetic sound-worlds too – but this is just not pure enough, not thought-out, but seemingly haphazardly employed… without sufficient time for development of an idea…
Then I suddenly hear children’s voices, and think they sound just great in this machinescape… until I realize the voices stem from real live children playing in the hallway outside my apartment…
Not all electroacoustic music is interesting. This is a hard fact that has to be faced now and then. On compilations such as this one it is rare that any uninteresting or not so focused pieces are chosen, but it happens, and for a number of reasons, taste just being one of them. It is tough to value a piece of electroacoustics when you have to choose from many entries, and there might be cases when a composer has produced brilliant art before, and is chosen on those merits, even though the piece at hand might be out of place. It is also true that I am a hard judge when it comes to sincerity of expression, since my work with reviews is a work out of love, with no money involved, which would make it perverse and very awkward of me to try to shy away from negative criticism when it is needed.

8. Christien Ledroit: “Miasmata”

Sonoloco comment:
It hits from the left, meteorite-fast, and stops dead to munch!
Electric saffron-monks murmur detached in the spacious background, as a watery, cave-some awareness moves in close to your face.
The sounds form a drone, spilling consciousness along the rim of perception, as silvery shapes of sound materialize, cooling the palms of your hands.
Tin birds hang from rusty iron firs, tinkling in the breezes of sub-consciousness like fond memories of childhood X-mas angels.
The chirping of electric birds inside the circuitry of machinery reach air and arrive at auditory organs through minute compressions of the atmosphere, giving rise to visions of wingers of imagination inside our brains, collectively hooked up to the dynamo of imagery at the center of the universe.
Distant loggers out of the tale of Hans & Gretchen are heard as muffled echoes of gleaming axes through the forest.
Jack-in-the-box birds pop up everywhere, swaying on top of their springs, mixing their metallic, mechanic songs with real soundscape songbirds of the composer’s hard-drive ornithology collection.
Ledroit is an expert at opening spaces, handling ambiences.
The springy, tinkling and droning properties of “Miasmata” renders the piece its atmosphere of enchantedness and its ability to tap into the secret beauty of tales.
A male choral passage passes like a dream, like mist across a summer’s meadow, dissolving into a jackknife exposition of light Ligeti organs.
A magnificent fluttering of distorted wings rattle the soundscape, until a choking inhalation sucks it all in, into a black hole oral cavity of deathbed anxiety, eventually delivering you at the start of a Bardo walk amongst the scarecrows of your karma.
At a certain instance, around the area of the composer’s distortion alert, I could swear I hear my late cat Izzi licking her nose and mouth a number of times after having had something to eat or drink. It’s really close-up, at bowl level, and certainly the tongue of a cat sweeps speedily at face value! This is sonic art!

9. Mathieu Marcoux (1975): “Corporation” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
Isn’t it a little unfair to the unsuspecting listener to start off a piece at this thunderous volume! The thunder dies down right away to the more comfortable crumpling of paper bags, though, or something of that character, elevated here to the level of art; sound art – and warum nicht!?
Tiny traces of sound rustle about in the sonic underbrush like undefined insects through the dry leaves of yesteryear – but beware, more sonic eruptions are to occur out of these meager circumstances, so safeguard your speakers, Mr. And Mrs. Listener!
The stark and merciless contrast between the two sorts of sounds presented by Marcoux may also be associated with, on the one hand, the theoretical sound of moonlight across snowy expanses, glittering in the crystals, and, on the other hand, the brute noise of a fat boy treading the cold snow in heavy Salomon hiker’s boots, on his forceful and determined way towards whiskey or coffee or whatever it might be…
A high-pitched, modular, vocal ingredient, velvety dawning, modulates the content of the audio into a beautifully estranged, alienated, dissociated mirage, somewhere deep inside the web of sounds, reaching an effect not unlike the wondrous “Over de Dood en de Tijd” by Gilius van Bergeijk (soon to be re-released on CD).
A forceful, rhythmical tremor, massaging your tympanic membranes, transforms seamlessly into bell-like gleanings, gleaming like golden elves’ bells across the sounding space, shortly lining up into parallel lines of vibrating gold-dust audio in the sunlight, super-sensitive to the spiritual force fields of the universe, reforming and regrouping accordingly.
The golden notes amass and join forces into one standing wave of sound, containing fundamentals and overtones in a masterly drone of timbral excellence, stretching, stretching… until the impression cracks and splinters into a myriad of pieces, sailing like weightless debris aboard a space shuttle, but one and all containing all the timbral beauty of the original drone, now at the nano-level inside the once again overwhelming crumpling of paper, and we go on to other chores…

10: Daniel Romano: “Cosmos” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
A bulging great bell, as if heard through great waters, the attack stolen away; just the pure waveform let lose to cut the air in razor-sharp strata of winding curvatures… arrives backwards at its attack, and is rejoined with it, forged back onto it…
Bee swarms rise out of the bell strata like venomous pointillist aggressions, seeping over the edge of something metallic, smooth and cool, just to be ground down into a mangling interstellar star crusher, at the periphery of mineral existence…
At a growling pace perfect marble spheres roll along the horizon, reflecting Salvador Dali’s clouds in their polished surfaces.
Messages in need of decoding escape out of tiny cracks in the surfaces of metallic machinery, spreading a tasteless, smell-less film of unintelligible morphemes across the smooth surfaces of the turned-away intellects of humanity.
Romano handles his sounding material with the expertise of a circus juggler, having rhythm precipitate out of pitch and vice versa, in a Stockhausenesque manner, which impresses me and gets me rocking and rolling! There is not a dull moment in Daniel Romano’s “Cosmos”. I feel racing bike tubes spinning away across silk asphalt in midsummer nights of nature’s freshest fragrances, as the anatomy of the biker, one with the bike, soars and floats across the rural landscape as the moist air of night caresses him.

11. Julien Roy (1975): “Rémanence” (Remix) (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
A shower of dry peas set off the piece, as they’re emptied from a textile bag onto a flat surface, but they’re soon lost in an unruly ambience of uncertain qualities, until relieved by rubber band finger games arising in soft-spoken vibrations.
The bleak remains of Edvard Munch’s scream sweep by at 0:52, not even one minute into the work, disguised inside layer upon layer of insidious sonic manipulation.
The rubbery rhythmic repetitions pan from right to left, stirring the sound with motion; a sense of fast propulsion.
The torrential rush of this circling ambience is soft and light enough to evoke sights of bouncing balloons in a fondling summer breeze, not lacking in detail and tangible volumes, offering elastic resistance under your fingertips.
The music is pregnant with a densifying ambience, gathering strength every second, increasing in sonic volume, until suddenly shifting from quantity to quality, reaching a minimalistic brilliance of hypnotic rhythms at 2:26, entering a realm of magnetic Philip Glass pulses at 2:42, shining and rotating in an interstellar radiance of quasar or pulsar qualities! Extremely beautiful and lustful! Toupie dans le ciel!
Recklessly wonderful sonic illusions dance behind this grating of thudding rhythms, stroboscopically distributed across your eyes. I believe I hear the auditory properties of a child’s voice, stripped of its individuality, smearing childhood itself right across my forehead!
This is right in the middle of Julien Roy’s piece, and I feel I’ve reached one of the shuddering highlights in the history of electroacoustic music! The build-up to get here, in a mere three minutes, and the sonic release of all that energy in these few seconds of utter electroacoustic beauty is shattering, almost bringing me to tears!
The remaining duration of Roy’s work is a soaring parachute descent over farm fields of summer, the world rising up towards you in wonderfully colored squares and rectangles of cultivation. Success! Congratulations from this reviewer and music connoisseur, who hasn’t been this overwhelmed in a very long time. I’m definitely off to read Nietzsche for a while! La gaya scienza! Jenseits von Gut und Böse! Twilight of the Idols!

12. Warren Spicer: “Singing of a Speaking Summer Swelter” (1999)

Sonoloco comment:
Tweaking hesitant tweets, then an infrasound rumble, joined by scraping, rippling, whining… open the piece – all subdued, inconspicuous; unusual!
It sounds – to begin with - like a leaking thermos flask plus prolonged forest birds on a droning power plant backdrop.
Spicer plays wittily with harnessed vibrations, like a juggler or a magician demonstrating the illusionistic splendor of his art.
This raw, yet refined, audio, coming across like some washed-up radio interference, flakes out like myriads of rectangular mirrors in space, reflecting themselves and the void in a rotating, dwindling pluralism, sinking into a cosmic background noise of shooting rays of light and sparks of electricity.
The color of the sound reminds me of Jean Schwarz’s most bizarre and rewarding piece; the great “Quatre Saisons”; an electroacoustic setting of J. W. von Goethe’s text! The austere, detached garden feeling is the same in Warren Spicer’s composition.
Once again – like in Julien Roy’s work above – I’m surprised at the richness of sound and artistic wit, and the quality of the composition, somehow working it’s way into a state of pure magic. This is indeed state of the art electroacoustic music, which really leaves nothing further to wish for. It’s pure, shining, auditive beauty – and filled to the rim with excitement!

13. Ian Stewart (1975): “Surveillance” (1998)

Sonoloco comment:
A few gray cardboard or cement sounds – rough 1950s’ façades – crowd in on each other to form a whole array of gray-zone sonic identities, like a congestion of rainy day people at a political rally; trench coats, hats, black umbrellas and heated exclamations out of the dictatorship of the proletariat!
Homages to the classical heroes of musique concrète are obvious, and they’re there to enjoy, not to be hidden away! Citations are obvious too!
This piece is a nicely spun miniature, respectfully delivered.

14. Ivan Zavada (1972): “Relation Diplomatik”

Sonoloco comment:
This last and final entry on the CD “Cache 2000” has some qualities in common with some of the preceding works, for example a grating of thudding rhythms, hypnotically panning, but Zavada’s use of the voice, repeating the title of the piece a few times, is different from what has been heard earlier on the compilation, appearing way inside a dense fabric of blurry sounds, more in a traditional text-sound manner.
Simultaneously a melodic garland, part of a traditional musical melody, moves to the fore, towards the end of the piece and the CD left unto itself in sublime dominance, thus delivering us, the listeners, at the comfortable quarters of the world of traditional acoustic instruments, however that anomaly is to be perceived as a final touch to this brilliant CD of electroacoustics…