All information in white fields (composers’ program notes) and gray fields (biographies) below is taken directly from the Sonicity information page, which explains why the language has been deprived of some of its vital expressions, such as capital letters and so forth, probably as a concession to modern email and Morse stylistics… I’m relieved that the Sonicity team hasn’t fallen prey to other common traits of style, such as aggressively dull CD covers and booklets with no information what so ever. On the contrary, the cover here is nice, artistic – and the information is complete without being excessive.
The texts between the white and gray fields are the humble expressions of the reviewer…

A sonic collection like this one, from a major seat of electroacoustic learning, is a dream for any connoisseur of sound art. You get the chance to find out where new sound art is heading, and also which influences are dominant – and perhaps just how free the artists may (or may not) be of those influences in their own creative acts… There are many pitfalls in contemporary artistic creation, and nowhere else is the tendency towards traditional inbreeding graver than in the so-called avant-garde disciplines, of which electroacoustic composition used to be one, and perhaps in some instances still is.

At the time of writing this, the Stockholm New Music Festival 2005 is in full swing, and one of the topics a couple of nights ago was the announcement of the winners of the EMS Prize of 2004 (yes, a belated prize ceremony for last year’s winners). EMS is the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, also called Electroacoustic Music in Sweden – a venerable institution in the vicinity of the even more honored institution Fylkingen.

If the quality of the winning pieces is to represent the best of sonic art these days, we’re in lousy shape... The winning entries were so incredibly unimaginative and inbred that vomiting would be the appropriate cleansing reaction. One of the two winners was a textsound/electroacoustic piece that dealt with… the composing of a textsound/electroacoustic piece in the studio… and the other one was a textsound/electroacoustic piece that used a text by F. T. Marinetti… The composer even testified to the assurance he felt using this old text. You see? Is there nothing else to occupy your creative urge with than a studio self-contemplation and a 100% safe usage of an old Marinetti text? The hypothetical worlds are bursting with things that haven’t yet been done, for Chrissake! The state of mind of the jurors must be in serious decay, or they are very, very tired…

However, apart from the EMS Prize Alzheimer pieces, much creative and fun has been heard at Stockholm New Music 2005, so I’m not completely devastated.
My point is, that if, in the center of what’s supposed to be the contemporary art music center of electronic and electroacoustic music in Sweden, such unworthy, unimaginative and untalented pieces win prizes, then what can you expect from this discipline? How will newcomers be able to treat the medium with curiosity and fresh minds?

Another serious problem that new sound artists face is the ample availability of software as well as hardware that will produce any sound or effect instantly, at will, right off the whim. In early days of electronic music there was a freshness in the medium itself, in the smell, even, of warm valves and ebonite, of soldering irons and factory-heavy equipment… Any sound that came out of those early efforts was welcomed, was treated with respect and awe (like the written word in the Stalin Soviet Union), as the composers sat down at their reel-to-reels, cutting and splicing tapes, varying the speed of tapes or playing those tapes backwards and so forth – even dipping them in flour (John Cage in Italy!).

The bottom line is that nothing worthwhile can be created without talent, without the act of composition, no matter how sophisticated the tools may be. The sophistication of the sound tools has in fact, in many cases – but not all! -, become a disadvantage for the composer; not an asset. Electroacoustic composition has, to a high degree, become an act of discrimination and ascetic aesthetics, for anything interesting to come out of the studios. It’s this act of fastidious reduction that may result in masterpieces. I immediately think of two maestros of sonic art; Hanna Hartman in Berlin and Yannis Kyriakides in The Netherlands. They have both, in their different ways, made the process of reduction a sublime art form, achieving masterly and devastatingly beautiful expressions. Let them serve as prime examples of the most positive aspects of modern sound art.

With these reflections I slide CD 1 of the Sonicity double into the player.

The first entry comes from Apostolos Loufopoulos; Night Pulses.

Indeed Loufopoulos matches our ever so stern expectations, a to the title of his work and it’s anticipated nocturnal properties. He does this so well, in fact, that he deserves having his work compared with a major piece by François Bayle; Les Couleurs de la Nuit (1982). Loufopoulos achieves the same nocturnal mystery; this soaring, entomologic velvet atmosphere with sudden glimpses of flaring and fading light; the fireflies of Texas; the glowworms of Scandinavia, the tips of cigarettes in the alleys of remote French villages…

Intense but invisible life is brewing in this darkness; high pitch febrilities vibrate right in your ears, in your face, while bell-like tensions flex space-time in bulging curvatures of alien existential traits… like crawling, disguised reminiscences from former existences, way down into your reptile lives and your insect lives, your microbe beginnings in the flesh – and yet the music is so breathless, so… light, so airy and spacious… in this velvet fragrance under the stars; gravity a mere embarrassment…

The timbre of the night is evident in a drone of bell sounds (without the attack) that hovers in the prickly amassment of pointillist audio; a growing, wobbling line on an ER screen or a consciousness that grows ever more aware and focused in the present, in this here NOW, like the Universe looking at itself through the senses of all sentient beings, in increasing amazement!
Fast pulses in darker matter corrugate the timbres, while other pulses, higher up, mimic – or foresee - communication, a Morse-like reach-out for companions in the far distance, below this elusive curvature of the horizon, in this screensaver world of ours, full of spheres and emptiness and guesses as good as mine…

Loufopoulos’ music slowly transforms itself into something else than it previously was, but always in a coherent, orderly and gradual way, which never embarrasses your acceptance. It’s a pleasure – an exciting and lustful pleasure – to let yourself be charmed out of your body by these persuasive sounds that reach way down into your subconscious and leads you by the mind to other places! Loufopoulos liberates you of your flesh and bones and your gravitational shackles, and takes what you are for what you are! Man is the larval stage of Spirit, and Loufopoulos intuitively knows this, through his music, as he gives you a glimpse of a future imago. Brilliant! Inspiring!

Pablo Garcia’s piece Emulse also commences in a delicacy of glass and light; wintry snow-light through a crystal vase with dry thistles from yesteryear in a window of a February cottage in Sweden.
However, this brittle tenderness of cold air and precious mittens immediately break up in an ice-flake build-up and crash-down of crusty audio, heaving us all into the domain of noise and static and edgy corners of scratching sonorities.
It’s a lively scenery in Garcia’s sound world, as he combines and mixes the brittle and sweeping gestures of delicacy with very close-up studies of balloon-rubbing and cardboard box crumpling. Yes, he treads into vast storages of surplus cardboard packing in a major downtown bankruptcy, shareholders scattering like cockroaches in a midnight kitchen when the light goes on…

Even though this soundscape is so varied and lively, it is very clean; every sound, every minuscule fraction of sound, stands out clearly and in crisp contours. This is an important aspect of Garcia’s music; one that makes listening intriguing and exciting and almost scientific; a lesson in perception.
The diversity goes for the dynamics too, and the variety of pitches, from low to loud sounds, from low to high pitches, all at once, or in sequence.
Yes, it is bewildering, as rock sounds and water sounds mingle with tweaks and whines from other concrete musique concrète at nano distances! You name it, we like it!

Incredibly palpable thuds and rebounds on the contact-microphone level upset your sense of balance, as you travel lightning-fast from macro to micro and back, sweeping across topographies in wild haste, only to retract like an inhalation into hidden fungi under the leaves of a forest floor! Wow! This music kicks ass!

A while into the piece Garcia introduces techno beats and hints at populist audio of our times, but only as ingredients in a commonwealth of equal opportunities, in a John Cage look at sounds, the one as good as the other, happily deprived of their social or psychological settings, free at last, free at last!

The way in which Garcia takes you by the neck and flies you around town squares and bus terminals, and finally in claustrophobic rest rooms or hidden-away offices, just by shifting the ambience of the sounds, is amazing. I seldom hear composers play with ambiences at this level of artistry!

Well, the composer’s introduction was so interesting that I dwelled on it a long while, having the CD player on hold, pondering magic atmospheres of names like William Blake and latter day sword swingers like Iannis Xenakis. I also notice that Elizabeth Anderson is the one and only participant on these CDs who has come of some age… and she’s also one of just two women in this collection. I don’t know what conclusions to draw, if any…

The beginning is as stylish and smooth as ever, with that affinity for detail that all pieces I’ve heard so far demonstrate. I really appreciate this kind of swirling acousmatique, and I wonder if it has to do with the leaders of the pack, the teachers Denis Smalley and Simon Emmerson, who’ve always made very clean cuts into the sonic fabrics.

Elizabeth Anderson startles me with the motion of her sounds, the approach and disappearance of ghastly figures out of senseless bardos of whirling, curled up thoughts and fears. She also provides an uncanny spatiality, enlarging earwidth space considerably inside my earphone existence.
I hear echoes of François Bayle, and there are worse predecessors, mind you!

So far there has been a good portion of French involvement in the handicraft of these extremely talented artists, much to my surprise and joy. I’ve always considered the French the main wholesale dealers of fluent and poetic electroacoustics, and of late they’ve been reinforced with the presence in Avignon of sound wizard Francis Dhomont, who’s moved on back to France from Quebec a short while ago. I am very much in favor of French influences in these realms, and I seem to get it the way I want it, having listened to the three first entries on this collection from the studios of City University, London.
It is very unusual to hear this smooth, rippling and poetic audio from a US composer of electroacoustics. I’ve never heard anything like it from the United States, until Elizabeth Anderson came along. It sort of gives me a streak of hope, somehow…

Anderson’s Blake acousmatique brings me deep into nocturnal mysteries, and I feel the breaths of Jean Schwarz and Bernard Parmegiani in there, in a curving, bending flexing fluctuation of sonorities.

After a while there is a break in the flow of fluent events, as a louder, slower state of mind ponders its bearing, like a dinosaur swinging its head high up in the air under a prehistoric moon, somewhere deep inside our hereditary memory bank.

The dew surfaces of thin bands of serpentine sonics reflect a pale starlight, and it probably is the dawning of Aquarius… Yes, so much space in this music, so much time – time and space – a lonely auditive journey through the lives, from body vehicle to body vehicle on an endless ride from where (?) to where (?). Elizabeth Anderson commands her spacecraft with diligence and fingertip accuracy, soaring us through her concepts of sound, premeditated and executed in her flight simulator of a studio!