Bernard Parmegiani; Sonare
Bernard Parmegiani – Sonare; mouvement 1 – 5 (1996)
INA e 5203. Duration: 25:25
Bernard Parmegiani, one of the original heroes of electroacoustic creativity, poetic French style, arrives on the scene with two new releases, vibrantly welcomed by one and all! His comrade François Bayle has richly rewarded the connoisseurs of sound with his Bayle Edition on his own Magison label, but Parmegiani has remained sparser. Looking in my collection I find but a few Parmegiani CDs, like La Création du Monde (INA C 102), De Natura Sonorum (INA C 3001), Violostries etcetera (INA C 1012/13), Enfer (Musidisc 245372) [one disc for Parmegiani, one for Bayle], L’Oeil écoute (Pierre Verany 725002), and finally this CD plus its companion CD released simultaneously; La mémoire des sons (INA C 2019). I read that there are a couple of more CDs out, on the Plate lunch and Cezame labels.
Sonare is one of the new CDs from Parmegiani on the INA (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) label. It is released in INA’s series with shorter duration CDs, in this case containing about 25 minutes of Parmegiani sound art. It is also a later work in his oeuvre; from 1996.
Bernard Parmegiani
(Photo: Guy Vivien)
Parmegiani describes his work thus:
|
[…] For each of the5 movements, I have chosen a pseudo-instrumental or synthesized sound which I sense will allow me to bring out its very essence, to develop it until it is within the deepest levels of the soul, if the soul can at all be rendered accessible to such acoustic resonance!
I had to imagine the most suitable interplay to bring out such intrinsic resonance. Now of course, no interplay can be genuine unless certain freedoms are present within or inherent to it, the rule being that such an interplay should remain musical whilst the sounds in a real context become linked to, or opposed to, each other. No combat, just interplay for its own sake, for itself alone, and, at the same time, changes in contour, an opening or closing in the tone, range, patterns of rhythm, as if the work were a living being in itself […]
|
|
Hitting a highly reminiscently coded note from the outset, Parmegiani starts off with the first few bars of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 14, op. 27:2, Moonlight…
This magically opens the glittering, glaring sonar fields of dream and reminiscence, the grand halls within ourselves where human emotions are stored with the patina of age and reverence… the same way Bob Dylan will be looked upon as a dandy like, perhaps Oscar Wilde or maybe like a villain like Baudelaire or a lightning genius like Rimbaud – in one hundred years from now, as we’re all way into our next life or even the life after that…
Of course, Parmegiani dissolves this feeling into a space of a myriad of sonic stars, shining right through the Age of Aquarius the blistering beauty and dreamscape of an anesthetic swirl through time-space… with a trembling, recurrent bass pointillism hovering at a low chakra for a touch of gravity… which, as we all know, stems from the curvature of time itself… on the slingshot of existence…
The music continues on a very much dreamy, austere note, bringing to the fore the shapes and uncertain intentions of elves and fairies and darker figures out of the remote hiding places of our minds, occurring before us like our auto-processed scare-crows of ourselves on our bardo journey through an after-life… the way it has to be, as explained in The Tibetan Book of The Dead and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying… and it occurs to me that electroacoustic music like nothing else can envision these bardos we all have to go through, and which we all have gone through already innumerable times between past lives.
Sonare is a set of brilliant dreamscape composition by Bernard Parmegiani, bringing the best of the composer’s past achievements into new, contemporary means of creativity, casting it all into a space of timelessness and utter amazement at the endless magnificence of existence…
|
|
