Studio Forum’s second CD, like the first one; Virtual ZOO, is a magnificent collection of short electroacoustic pieces, comprising a real festivity of whirling, swirling flakes of soundscapes and rambling electronic or concrete progressions of sound events.
There are too many participants to study them all in this text, but please note that the few chosen aren’t necessarily more interesting than the ones omitted; it’s simply a matter of random choice on the part of Sonoloco.

Most of the composers are French (though one each come from Mexico, the U.S.A., Italy, Germany and Japan) and for sure the French reputation of being a haven for a poetic, dancing, voyeur type of electroacoustics is reinforced amongst these highly diverse but also poetically, sensually coherent works of sonic art. Like the CD title suggests, this is a journey into the dream zone…

Track 1 has you wake up, early morning, inside a forest och birds, or a meadow of insects… aah… perhaps an enchanted place in time and imaginary space… and it keeps this naturalistic concretism up until the end of the short piece, by Rodrigo Sigal from Mexico. This is little more than a soundscape recording ripped off reality per se, but of course, in the choice of the window into a certain stretch of time there lies a compositional aspect.

Darker, more unidentifiable worlds in track 2 roll in like husky planets of distant galaxies across the unfathomable voids of time and space – but suddenly familiar voices in French get denser, stretch, thin out and take on a liquid quality, with bells of western religions casting shadows of pale and meager consolation across mankind. The voices are permuted into distant transmissions reflected off the steely surfaces of time indefinite, bending in on itself in elusive gestures.

A close – very close – male voice speaks inside your head in track 3. A jolly but somehow nostalgic melody of a synthesizer, perhaps, or a barrel organ!, accompanies the French story that unfolds in the piece called Amnésie, which really is a beautiful name, and maybe amnesia is dancing like this, like a fairy across the barbed wire on the far side of the morning meadow, across the drifting stretches of mist…

A droning, vibrating mimicry – or the real stuff? – of dijeridoos introduces and underlines another short piece, on which is projected a shortwave-like transmission of yet a male voice, speaking as if out of a time capsule, in an atmosphere of a lonely, doomed butterfly fluttering around your autumn kitchen by the window, where a wasp lies still and already dead; a dried up capsule in the shape of a wasp… and Time winds down, braces for winter and sharp stars on the canopy of the sky, while a distant, veiled Marta Argerich piano tries to console time itself and its aged journey through the hearts of humans, usually so bitterly unaware of their fabulous destiny through life after life, traveling their successive body-vehicles.

Water bubbles rise out of another piece; shiny, reflecting a room – where a rhythmic melody is hammered out at a piano joined by percussion and accordions. A woman talks, recites some kind of poem – and before the piece has even really started, it ends… What a pity! Maybe these talented composers of telltale and makeshift soundscapes will get more individual attention on later releases, with more durable works, i.e. of a longer duration!

Track 11 is one of the longer works, and long on this CD means about four minutes! However, such a short duration can be packed with sonic information and eerie auditory flybys; this is!
There’s no way, hardly, to keep up, but the beginning enters like the recollections of a steam engine, eventually transforming into a Stockhausenesque sound scene, parrot and all, wherein a witch’s sour laughter and a child’s sob is inserted, until a storm hits, mingling with the whining of a train on its rails. Crowds are heard cheering or screaming in fear…, and a second or two of a railway station fly by like leaves in the wind! Felipe Caramelos has worked hard to achieve this fast-moving kaleidoscopic mosaic of audio residues, making for a fascinating four minutes of attentive listening!

So much is going on on this CD, that all that remains after a walk-through is a dazed impression of the essence of the richness of expressions of planet life in the space-time continuum. Splendid!