The third issue in the New Zealand Sonic Art series is bursting with artistic vibrancy and ingenuity, making it a pleasure to travel through its sound worlds with a pen (well, ok; keyboard…) for jotting down notes in the process.

Martin Lodge at the University of Waikato in New Zealand has written some introductory notes to this CD, and I feel the inclusion of an excerpt of them will open our listening to an adequate expectation, a certain atmosphere:

The first track is Te Hau Kuri (Dog’s Breath) by Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns.
Mr. Melbourne is Associate Professor of Mäori and Acting Dean for the School of Mäori and Pacific Development at the University of Waikato. He commits himself to the development of modern as well as traditional Mäori music, and he is a member of a group – Hau Manu – that builds and plays Mäori instruments.
Richard Nunns is a performer and researcher of Mäori music and instruments, who has gained considerable appreciation for his work.

The story behind the piece Te Hauri Kuri is too interesting not to relate:

The exemplary booklet even includes the names of the traditional and other instruments utilized in this recording, in order of appearance:

1. Kü (mouth bows played by two people)
2. Pütätara (wind effects used here in a non-traditional way)
3. Pütätara (conch shell sounded traditionally)
4. Pükaea (natural wooden trumpet)
5. Pütorino (a small version sounding like a flute, while its bigger version sounds like a trumpet
6. Pümotomoto (a long flute)
7. Porotiti (a spinning disk that is blown or breathed on)
8. Panguru Whakatangi Tanguru (resonant rods held across the mouth, tapped with another rod)
9. Roria (a mouth harp made of bone or wood)
10. Kakara (a rattle tied around the neck of the hunting dog at night)
11. Pütorino (double flute; here a bigger version)
12. Pütorino sequence with added vocals
13. Kü (mouth bows, again played by two players)

Really, the opening sounds of the mouth bows associate mote to a deep and old tradition than to contemporary music. You get the feeling of spiritual realms opening inside attentive but relaxed consciousnesses, circular gatherings around camp fires through the ages, in a lineage of dots of fire from ancient times up to now; a fiery bead of consecutive time capsules, you in the last one, at the forefront of time rushing at the magic Einsteinean speed of 300 000 kilometers a second…

The piece is very short – just short of five minutes – so these instruments with their different characteristics pass briefly, and before you’re ready the piece is over. It would be a pity id this idea, this concept, wouldn’t produce a full-length CD in the future.

A murmuring, ascending and descending sound, adds an ominous air to the tingling, tangling, jingling, jangling feeling, and you can almost feel the chill of the mist engulfing you, the mist of the dog’s breath! The wooden trumpet and it’s smaller relative conjures up a peculiar jazzy feeling, which, according to the associations of a western listener, stuffed with western experiences, may sound completely out of place in this magic web of sounds.

The meditative, introspective vocals sharing the sounding space with Pütorinos, have the music lift off slowly and soar across mountains and valleys…

Track 2 is John Elmsly’s Soft Dawn Over Whispering Island.
Elmsly is Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Auckland, and also the director of the Karlheinz Company (I suppose Stockhausen has a truckload of influence on that name!) and the electronic music studios. Elmsly has produced musical works in a wide variety of idioms, of which the electroacoustic is just one.

Soft Dawn Over Whispering Island is the result of past efforts in other pieces. The composer has taken parts and fragments of these earlier compositions and developed them further in the way that a skilled electroacoustician can do in his magic machines.
He says:

The hovering, soaring beginning at first places you in one of those naturescape recordings of Sittelle, but before long you’re in a havoc of French-sounding acousmatique; swirling elegance of assembled and dispersed sounds, painted with a lush brush of duration and pitch, in timbres that shine and glare with all the colors of the rainbow, in the transparency of wings of dragonflies in the shade of leafy branches reaching out over shallow sections of meandering rivers in the late summers of Scandinavia.
The pounding of silver hammers of elves in the dew of a secret meadow chisels the dreams of noble layers of consciousness, where bliss is assured in a good and gentle universe.
A female voice of a human travels through these circumstances in this world of dreams, her body resting heavily in its own gravity, the mind let loose on spiritual expeditions into possible realizations that might rub off some on the behavior of wake actions…
Rushing air and fluttering water transform into the feeling of a passenger jet on high, leading its white trace of exhaust across the sky, intensely watched by trembling frogs at the pond, their bodies green and gray at the surface, mosquitoes appearing in sudden shots of light against the sun, while mysteries come and go like shadows on the water.

Kit Powell appears at track 3 with Contrasts.
Powell is the oldest seigneur on this CD, if that means anything. He was born in 1937. He is a composer of many facets, experienced in all aspects of art music. His special interest lies in chance operations and the utilization of found objects of stone, wood and metal. Since 1984 he is situated in Switzerland, where he has been working with computer music as well as other idioms.

He lets on that Contrasts is made up of found sounds and New Zealand birdcalls. He has even attached a subtitle to that significance. The bird sounds are legally ripped off of a CD called Native Birds of New Zealand, published by Viking Seven Seas Limited in Paraparaumu.

In Contrasts Powell has contrasted manmade sounds with the bird sounds, without the employment of electronic manipulations. In addition to cutting and mixing he has only tampered with volume and pitch.
A sense of elastic bells and fast, sharp 180-degree motions makes a bewildered impression, and nowhere do I detect any birds… bur rather… bells and crumpling paper…
There is a fair amount of silence dispersed here and there, and suddenly I do detect the slowed-down flapping of birds taking off. A whining sound reveals a traditional instrument, and later percussive sounds take turn with actual, natural shrieks of birds. A panning sensation is often evident, as sounds move rapidly left-right or vice versa, or as sounds appear very much left, for example, to be counteracted due right, and so forth.
It’s a strange piece, which I wouldn’t have understood the way the description goes, had I not read it.
Scraping, screeching, industrially colored Dumitrescu audio and jingling hinge sounds fly up and flutter around like weary spirits in a state of limbo.

Phil Dadson’s audio at track 4 is Zitherum Voice.
This composer has a background as an intermedia artist, having worked with a group called From Scratch, combining invented instruments with a highly rhythmical style of composition and visual design. He has also worked with installations, video, radiophonic works, sound sculpture and performance.

The work Zitherum Voice features the longstring Zitherum (zither / drum), which is a three-meter long tubular-frame acoustic instrument, strung with three piano wires connected to polystyrene resonators. Dadson explains that this instrument can be played in a variety of ways, for example percussively with sticks, steel-slides or hands, droned with nylon bows etcetera, but in this recording he plays it with a battery-powered hand fan to produce, he says, an accompaniment of shifting harmonics. This is not a composition per se, but a recorded improvisation.

I once knew a guy in Stockholm who played an electric whisk on his daily newspaper. I’m talking about Sune Karlsson and hos 12-hour investigation into household sound sources; Phonia Domestica.
Zitherum Voice, in a way, reminds me of this approach to the art of sound. Dadson has manipulated his sound more than Karlsson, though, in long, winding stretches of vibrations, eventually, now and then, interrupted by harsh and sudden twangs and plucks. It is primitive but catches on immediately. This eight-minute improvisation could easily be extended up to an hour, at least.

Ian Whalley brings his piece Kasumi.
Whalley is Director of the Computer Music Studios at the University of Waikato. He is said to be influenced by the Pacific and the Asian gestures of sound, which he treats with electroacoustic techniques.

He explains that he has used short instrumental samples of different kinds of Mäori instruments for Kasumi. They are:

1. Köauau Klöiwi Kuri (Dog bone)
2. Köauau Pongäihu (Nose flute)
3. Tumutumu; wood striking the jawbone of a pilot whale
4. Tumutumu; striking a slice of argelite (Paköhe)
5. Pahü Pounamu (small Greenstone gong)
6. Ipu Korero (flax beater)

Sustained sounds are derived from Panguru Whakatangi Tanguru (tapped rods using mouth resonation) and Pütorino (wooden wind instrument)

There is a Japanese text for the work, taken from Manyoshu, number 4290, written by Otomo no Yakamochi in the year 753.
It contrasts, says Ian Whalley, internal sadness with new beginnings, with each phrase summarizing an image or idea. The words are:

Haru no No ni, Kasumi Tanabiki, Uraganashi, Kono Yu-kage ni, Uguisu Nakumo.

It means:

Over spring field, floats the mist, a lonely feeling, though in the twilight, a warbler sings.

A clear, transparent air immediately opens into an intellectual realm of crystalline thoughts and determined introspection. Glass sounds bring rays of light into the composition, whispering words bring closeness and human breath, bamboo-like sounds inspire sceneries of the slopes of Mount Fuji and the snow-capped summit towering high above the skirt of mist, like a vision of clear Rigpa, everlasting, ever-present.
The combination of these elements; the crystalline glass, the sustained tones of flutes, the close-eared whispers and the percussive ingredients… and the fresh air that is allowed into this atmosphere, makes for an unusual musical journey inwards, which is as much a spiritual experience as it is musical pleasure. I am impressed at this highly original and so well chiseled vision, in this shape of a work of sound art.

The Void is a work by Norman Skipp.
Skipp is comparably young, born in 1971. He has studied with, among others, Jack Body, John Elmsly and John Rimmer.
The Void is based on an earlier work called Red Earth, in which the force was personal cultural resonance with the land of one’s birth. When shaping sounds for The Void Norman Skipp related to certain visual ideas, like amoebic movement, the opening of flowers and pollen in the wind.

Yes, it sounds magic, and like ideas that might as well have risen out of Icelandic visions and the mind of Björk, but here we are at the antipode, geographically, of that, in New Zealand, though the magic is flowing just as fluently as in Iceland.

Deep murmurs from hidden layers of existence make the ground of life tremble in brown and black formations of clay and rock, in a dark ambience of sorts, welling forth in relentless and unstoppable waves of timbres that carry glittering surfaces of star-reflecting matter, like the floating monolith above Jupiter in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its unsolved mystery of a God… or of the Mind… or Rigpa…
Norman Skipp’s music spirals and rolls through the ether, slowly changing character, introducing the noise of seas against rocks… or perhaps inter-planetary static of electro-magnetic force fields caught on the recording equipment of Voyager; a lonely sound of the Void…

The seventh entry is Chris Cree Brown’s Aeolian Harp Sounds.
Brown teaches music at the University of Canterbury.
He designed an Aeolian Harp in 1999, fitted into a sculpture that would support the air stream through the strings.
On this recording, the strings have been randomly tuned, in contrast to the traditional tuning, which prescribes identical tuning for all the strings.
Brown has been working with Aeolian Harps for many years, and has invented new additions to the instrument, like bridges that allow the strings to lie perpendicular to the soundboard instead of parallel to it.
Chris Cree Brown has the notion that he is not the one doing the musical communication, but that it is Gaia or some sentient energy that permeates the planet. He says that all he has done is simply to construct a device that unlocks the sounds, which he feels have a spiritual quality.

This makes me think of Terry Riley’s spellbinding work Harp of New Albion, which is a piano composition in several parts, played in just intonation around an old legend about a harp left on a mountain in New Albion (now California near San Francisco) by Sir Francis Drake in 1578, changing its tuning according to weather and humidity, creating an ever-changing sound across the surroundings.

Brown’s harp is a small working model of his concept, placed in Christchurch Botanical Gardens, heard on a backdrop of the chirping of birds.

The sounds of this Aeolian Harp are indeed of an enchanted character, changing, turning, winding, rising, sinking, like smoke on the wind or reflections of sunlight on water. In a way it conveys an impressionistic vision; light and shadows, wind through trees, cold breaths of air through hot afternoons, dragonflies like blue rods over the surface of calm river bends…
On the other hand, these high pitch sounds could well stem from the Mongolian Winds that form the title of one of the parts of Terry Riley’s work Salome Dances for Peace, written for string quartet, but also performed by Riley on a grand piano.
Surely this music would call for a longer recording, even more so than the other two entries of this CD that I’ve said the same about. These melodies of the wind and the ether, like moonlight through spider webs or thoughts through cerebral cortexes, are wonderful venues of meditation, of introspective focusing, or simply of rewarding listening.

The eighth part of New Zealand Sonic Art III is Rake by Chris Knox.
Knox comes from a somewhat different perspective than the other composers on this CD. He has a background in punk rock, participating in bands like The Enemy and Toy Love. Later he turned more experimental.

With a healthy, unpretentious attitude vis-à-vis the philosophical or artistic meaning of his work, Knox says that it has little intrinsic meaning beyond a delight in the sounds themselves, and simply explains how he got this bit together. He recorded the noise of the cleaning of Ericsson Stadium after some games, which is done by a secondary school. He recorded the havoc of rakes on metal, plastic, paper and glass onto a Sony Walkman, later to unload it in Protools. He extracted small sections of the audio, and extended them with time stretching, while other sections were cut-up, looped, inverted or reversed.

In a strange way, the sound that emerges as a peculiar relationship to the preceding piece by Chris Cree Brown, but in a slow-motion variant!
It starts with a growling, creaking sound that you can’t quite – or at all! – make out, but it’s very pleasurable. It is elastic in a strange way; maybe like the sound you may get – if you’re lucky – turning the dial of a shortwave receiver. These darker, rubbery, gluey sounds are joined by percussive, echoing sounds; the echo feeling probably residue from the original stadium field recording.
Eventually the sound space fill up with an amassment of stadium cleaning sounds, almost drenching the original elasticisms, but towards the end these elongated, stretched moments take on beautiful timbral characteristics, in a chorus fashion, like a Hammond organ playing at the bottom of the sea in some TV cartoon series!

William Harsono appears at number 9 with Subconscious.
Harsono is the youngest composer of the lot, born in 1980. He emigrated from Taiwan to New Zealand in 1996. Even though he is so fresh to both life and New Zealand, he has already studied with John Rimmer, John Elmsly, Eve de Castro-Robinson, John Young, Jack Body, Ross Harris and John Psathas.

He says that he had two aims when composing Subconscious. One was to create three-dimensional sound; the other to express his hidden personality and feelings.
He wanted sounds to move upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards as well as sideways. (This reminds me quite a bit of Stockhausen and the ideas he realized in, for example, Octophonie). He is quite ambitious, in that he wants to bring the audience into a meditative mood, and to their subconscious world. This does indeed sound quite pretentious and… young – but it also reveals how serious Harsono takes art, and this is another characteristic that he shares with Grand Seigneur Stockhausen.
Harsono also explains that he has used a Chinese text of his own, with metaphorical meaning. The texts are supposed to contain subliminal thoughts and feelings.

William Harsono’s text utilized in the piece read, in a translation from the Chinese original:

A coin spinning on a table, in different electroacoustic guises… the panning of circling sounds, the beat of a heart, the fluttering of leaks under pressure, sudden tweaks, small, inconspicuous sounds close to your face and large but distant sounds of soaring jets, airplanes on high, traces across blue skies, and again minuscule worlds under the looking glass of electroacoustics… A voice close by, but behind a curtain of time, permuted by the inconsistency of closeness in space but distance in time…
The spinning coin returns in repetitious mirrorings, as elastic extensions of droning timbres stretch out like high altitude clouds at a northern summer’s dusk…
Harsono has managed very well to create a mysterious world of sound, which may bring strange visions to the minds of imaginative listeners.

Michael Norris is closing the set with his concluding Aquarelle.
Norris, who to me – though quite a well-known contemporary composer - primarily is known for his work with ingenious filters for the sound software SoundMaker, has studied with such forefront figures of electroacoustics as Simon Emmerson and Denis Smalley.

Aquarelle has – Norris explains - its beginnings in a visit he made to France, where he was influenced by Monet’s Nymphéas murals in Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris as well as the different church bells in the hill villages of Provence and the Mer de Glace at Mont Blanc in a dazzling, shimmering whiteness.

The music starts ever so softly, almost inaudible, imperceptible, dawning on you like the slowly intensifying light across the high plateau of Tibet, or like enlightenment through your being through intense studies of the Tibetan Book of the Dead or Sogyal Rinpoche’s sublime book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Electroacoustically, and perhaps also artistically, this is one of the highlights of the CD. You can sense a brilliance of timbral perfection; a crystalline precision of audio application; a refined essence of thought and vision in sonic gestures across the work; from the atomic jitter of the micro level to the sweeping brushwork of the macro level. Norris seems to work his art in an intuitive way, or maybe he is so skilled that he manages to keep this impression even through well-calculated maneuvers. The result is stunning, nonetheless, and extremely exciting and pleasurable to experience.
He weaves a transparence of sonic expression across your lifespan, rising in bleak light through the gap between hearing and breathing with resin-smelling forest extracts and the notion of nightly flights across topographies of coniferous latitudes.
In a Björk-associated freshness he takes you to the glacial source of bar night ice cubes, letting the pure idea of ice tumble about in the weightlessness of mind like cold diamonds of the intellect, reality’s ice cubes falling over your head in a shower of merriness; a Zen action in a daytime breakthrough of insight!
I’d say that Norris through this masterpiece in fact equals the finest productions out of the studios of the French audio wizards, like Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle, and he’s now comparable with his fellow countryman Denis Smalley! Congratulations!

The third volume in the series New Zealand Sonic Art has proven to be a shining gem in the production of contemporary electroacoustic music. I wouldn’t be without it. Waikato University is doing a great job releasing these splendid CDs, and Sonoloco Record Reviews and I extend our gratitude to all the participants of this venture.