The thirtieth and last of the Cinéma pour l’oreille cds is the most peculiar, too. Here’s how it breaks down: thirty seconds of distorted (backwards?) voices over some noise. Silence. Slowly growing rumble; slowly growing louder, slowly adding other sounds, a gritty, gravelly sound early, an unobstrusive wash about three and a [...]

Oddly enough, Dix-sept minutes is almost exactly seventeen minutes long. And while it contains a lot of clock noises, including but by no means limited to ticking and chiming, those sounds are only part of a rich and complex tapestry that also includes acoustic instruments (single notes only), voices (mostly choir sounds [...]

The train is king of sounds; long live the king!
But don’t expect a whole lot of train noises in this piece. This is a serious piece which happens to use train sounds as one of its sources, but only one. There are electronic sounds and people talking, on and off the radio, [...]

The first sound of Mantra is like that of a motor starting up (motor, not engine), which is only remarkable because nothing else like that ever happens again in the piece. It’s repeated several times in the first few seconds (sounding less and less like that motor, by the way) until overwhelmed [...]

Unsettled line starts out with some night sounds—cricket-like—which are joined by increasingly sharp, mechanical sounds and some truly luscious electronic grit. There are some pretty harsh sounds here, and some laughter, and some Tibetan singing bowl, and although there are a few drones now and again, this piece takes place mostly over [...]

On or about 1999, someone came up with the idea of handing over all the Cinéma pour l’oreille cds to date to Erik M (now known as eRikm) to do with what he would.
Was it a good idea? Yes. Will you be able to recognize any of those twenty-three pieces? Yes, just [...]

I first heard Lionel Marchetti in the Ground Fault recording of Portrait d’un Glacier (Alpes 2173m). Le Grande Vallée could almost be called Portrait des feuilles sèches, as the sound of crunching through the autumn leaves strolls through the whole piece. Over the top of that are voices calling, human, wolf, bird. [...]

This piece could almost be taken as a test case of how inherently musical speaking voices are. I’m fairly certain that that’s not the main thing they set out to do in this piece, but it’s just as certain to me that that’s one of things that’s happened. Des travailleurs opens with [...]

I’m tempted to say that this is the most col…. But no, I cannot. It is wildly beautiful, though. Dangerously low frequencies, that is if you’ve a good system and neighbors. Lovely bright hard sounds, too. You doubtless already like the scratchy sound at the beginnings or endings of LPs….

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In the first of these two silences, Castellani blends internal combustion engines and the squeaky wheels of a farm cart with low drones and vaguely organ-like sounds, along with both natural and harshly processed bird calls. Blends is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. While there are long stretches where sounds gradually [...]