The Answer Is In The Beat

v/a: Traces Two LP (Recollection GRM, 2013)

October 15, 2013 at 11:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I missed out on Traces One (and I can’t find it anywhere, at least not on physical form) but otherwise I’ve been buying all the other Recollection GRM releases, and very slowly getting around to listening to them all. I totally love all this old musique concrete, so I feel like this is an important series of releases to pay attention to. This compilation gives some exposure to lesser-known French composers that I haven’t heard otherwise. Dominique Guiot’s “L’oiseau de paradis” is a cinema-inspired soundscape, juxtaposing squawking sounds, whistling sine waves and fluttering tones, and cutting to and from different scenes with little warning. Pierre Boeswillwald’s “Nuisances” is a collage intentionally utilizing sounds which might have been rejected by other artists in favor of “better” ones. These end up being a series of scrapes, whirs, roars and slide whistle-like tones, and comes across like a sort of bizarre, malfunctioning carnival ride. Rodolfo Caesar’s “Les deux saisons” is based on improvisations for glass organ and a frequency modulation device, and is a series of squeaks, creaks and twitters, some of it with an oddly timestretched-sounding texture to it. Probably the highlight of the collection is Denis Smalley’s “Pentes”, featuring a succession of globby, gelatinous explosions, like a starcraft gliding through space and continually ending up crashing in a crater full of purple ooze. As ridiculous as that sounds, it ends up getting pretty isolated and possibly even frightened for a minute, before Northumbrian pipes drift in, and then the globby explosions resume. Reading the liner notes, these are all early pieces by artists who came to prominence as electro-acoustic visionaries later on, and some of their works have been (unofficially) re-released by Creel Pone, so I think I have more exploring to do.