This is Randall Smith’s second CD on empreintes DIGITALes, and things have happened since last time. He has started to compose mixed form works, combining traditional instruments and electronic music (usually a pretty dubious venture…), and of late he has – which make me feel really joyous – started to study the Iranian instrument tar with Ahmad Ashraf-abadi. It is very good when contemporary composers widen their outlook to incorporate non-Western musical cultures. It is a very natural occurrence for anyone sincerely in love with sound and music, but it doesn’t happen all that often. These non-Western cultures bring in so many new aspects on sound; on duration and timbre that no one who has enjoyed non-Western musical encounters remains unchanged.
Randall Smith’s pathway towards instrumental integration really began way back in 1992, when he started taking violin lessons with Eugene Kash, though he remained a purely electronic composer all the way up to 1995, which is when he met the cellist Daniel Domb, for whom he wrote “Continental Rift” for cello and tape.

It is plain to see that Randall Smith is a composer in constant evolutionary flux, on the way somewhere, which makes it all the more interesting to listen to his music.

“InsideOut” (1999) is intriguing in that all sounds of the piece are derived from four acoustic instruments; alto flute, violin, E-flat clarinet and double bass. Smith says that his idea was to manipulate the original sounds in all possible ways, while still retaining some kind of recognizable print of the instrument through this process. Finally Smith explains: “InsideOut is the combination of the highly abstract process of the creation of sound objects and their metamorphosis into dispersed fields of polyphonic tonal languages.”

The opening is like a persistent rocking of an old sofa, scraping against the floor, while a highly rhythmical pattern – with the sub-pattern of the “sofa” – lingers on and lures you into a minimalistic, repetitive hypnosis, into which space-film sounds are introduced in a down-ward glance, as munching, echo-chamber reminiscences land in springy flurries countered – or counter-pointed - by marked singular chords, eventually gearing up into a higher pitched organ-like environment. It’s hard to keep track of all the changes, mind you… You have to hold on to your mind on a journey like this…
A dance figure – mechanical; a ballet mecanique worthy a George Antheil! – is followed by a jolly barrel organ likeness… because everything here has to do with likenesses, resemblances, hints, rumors… and you’re on a train deep in the tunnel under the Tsugaru Straits between the Japanese islands of Honsu and Hokkaido, scrambling through the claustrophobic fear of a blow-out somewhere along the 52 kilometers…
It’s quite amazing to remember that all these sounds – though heavily manicured, face-lifted and bent out of shape – stem from four acoustic instruments!
Drones wriggle and spiral on ahead, out of view, as tingles, sharp-edged tingles, sprays of tingles – shower down to beat your cheeks like icy snow particles in a head on February storm…

“Liquid Fragments 1” (1996) for double bass and alto flute occupies track 2. After the initial beat – brownish, muffled – those darn insects have to chat intensely just below your sight – but the flute of the little elf sprays Stockhausenesque fairy powder over the premises, opening up for your dreams, taking shape in fluttering wind-instrument environments – but the insects (they have wings!) stand hovering at the gate of both your ears, giving you a panning giddiness, having your torso wiggle around like a bat on a string…
The mix is really working in this piece. I am very suspicious of mixed form works, but I must admit that this try succeeds flat out! An incredible amount of work – of artistic decisions – must have gone into a jumble of lonely hours by the screen, to get a fix on this lot!

With “Elastic Rebound” (1995) we’re back in purity again; electroacoustic purity; hence no mixed forms… The title is taken from the geologist’s terminology, defining the re-bounding motion along a fault line (like the San Andreas fault) that is the result of tectonic forces building up on either side of the line.
Indeed the work explores a lot of frictional sounds, but small, pearly, sparkly bubbles of gas also well up through the cracks. Metallic springs evidently release their stored power in little swaggers, and rubbery elasticisms wave back and forth like long extended bands across the electronic devices. A coolness of the sounds momentarily has me visualize delicious ice cream chunks, which I munch in suiting chews. It’s Häagen-Dazs ice cream; the kind I used to have when I lived in Dallas, Texas… where we were spared fault lines but treated to tornados…

Little sounds trickle down like moisture on a fall window, and even smaller incidents of shorter durations show up like whimpers in the corner of the left eye, then the right eye, and then they’re gone, eventually instigating a potentially harmful, hazardous murmur way over behind my back, in he clearing, behind the barn… If somebody is chopping wood there, it’s most probably a scout from the trolls in the mountain, for I can hear how several more of them are forcing their way out of the rock; I hear the grinding, hurting, struggling oozing sound of troll liberation, from deep down in the granite… and it ends in a sudden frenzy…

“Continental Rift” (1995) for cello and tape brings us back into the mixed area again. It seems Smith always has some kind of structural – or historical – idea behind his works, or at least some kind of model that doesn’t have to have to do with music or the arts. In “Elastic Rebound” we were dealing with earthquake ideas, and now we’re into long term evolution, wherein even the continents shift position, disrupting and modifying the face of the planet.
Randall Smith brings a cello, played by Paul Widner, into this process. The role of the cello is to introduce codes or keys from the past, from the oeuvres of Bach, Beethoven and Kodaly. The musical evolution in Smith’s piece then bores through to our contemporary knit wit order, wherein those codes dissolve in the cross-auditive hell-raise of today… where we know we have to get lost in rites, those healthy rites from long gone, from right here, within – and the loose and open art of electroacoustics is a way into these rites, these necessary paint shops of the spirit! Between the Kaiserkeller and the Dakota there is an expanse of earthen life, a mumbo jumbo school of sorts, but get involved, if necessary through detachment…
The fairly straight concretisms of the cello is spiraled by Smith’s moving comments in the electroacoustic language of many guises, as the Prelude of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1” emerges un-altered out of the maze, practically astonishing me with its abrupt deliverance out of this spooky electronic dream, into a well-known leathery armchair in front of a cozy fireplace, a glass of wine on the table and a purring cat on my knee, right inside that wondrous piece of art, the Cello Suites, unsurpassed until this day, on tap directly from the Creativity of God. But, alas, Bach also spreads out, floats like liquid over the table, trickles onto the floor – the cat scratches your knee when he darts off in horror, and we’re back in a world where nothing is sure and anything happens, inside this musical affair.
“Continental Rift” keeps on keeping on for 15 minutes, but it seems more of an experiment than justly justified electroacoustics; like a game where Smith has set some rules only he knows, and he plays them out right in our faces – and behind our backs…

“The Unmoved Centre” (1997) again is pure electroacoustics, if the expression is allowed. I’ve seen many a forlorn discussion over on the CEC discussion list about the electroacoustic terminology… but I don’t give it much thought – whatever one chooses to call it, to me the sounding result is the one thing that matters… and musicologists (some very much self-ordained) can keep the chatterboxes oozing! I’ll listen for that rare spark of divinity in these remote realms of creation…
Now, this (“The Unmoved Centre”) is very classy, and very classical – in the sense that it’s pure pouring out of free flowing imagination, let loose on the therapist’s sofa or in your armchair by the window as you tilt your head in despair and feel the cold taste of the marble window sill on your forehead. The sounds are moving in dispersed desperation, and the fragments of thoughts are stirred up by passing bodies, only to fall down again in the perfect pattern of an exquisite love poem - and the bouncing, itching, fondling, trembling and wheezing sounds help outlining the message from the heart of the matter… Nocturnal atmospheres are re-enacted by Smith in this truly magnificent piece of sound art. You’re taken by the hand in your age of five, and led to a summerhouse in a forgotten 19th century garden on Animal Island (this really happened), where the apple trees are old, wretched and crouched, and where the bees have taken up residency under the circular roof of stone. The canopy of the sky is a see-through hammerhead of gravity, and all strings are attached…

“Convergence” (1998) for accordion and tape concludes this interesting – and partly utterly wondrous – CD from Randall Smith. An important point here is - as Smith lets on - that most of the tape part is made from recordings from non-Western cultures. I’d like more of that to happen!
A carnival atmosphere opens the program, and nothing much electroacoustic is felt – just a repeated figure in the accordion idiom. Jolly jerks of old polkas and burlesque indecencies lighten up the passage of time in these sleazy quarters, off-off some more important street, and carnival bands practice in backyards of oblivion…
It all boils down to a musical diversion; an incident in the backwash oeuvre of a truly gifted electro-acoustician who wants to sit back a while in view of what he’s accomplished so far, just letting thoughts and fingers run in the vein of mambo-rumba jingle jangle juggles, as time washes everything out of view and sense…