Asymmetry Music Magazine » Cinema pour l’Oreille

Zbigniew Karkowski, Consciously Unconscious, Unconsciously Conscious (MKCD033)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:07:57 +0000

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 half minutes in that vanishes almost before you’ve noticed it. A little over five minutes in, and the grit turns to a rhythmic, sandpapery sound, and the rumble gets more regular, like an engine. This lasts for about a minute and then it’s back to the original undifferentiated rumble but with some little furtive crackling over the top. Then the rumble plunges downward and stays there until 8:06, when it becomes a more a throb than a rumble. The sandpapery sound comes back about forty seconds later, and the throb settles into a drone. A high pitched sound that’s been very very quiet for about three minutes gets suddenly noticeably louder, and the low frequency matches the rhythm of the sandpaper until almost the ten minute mark. (The piece is 19:45.) Then there’s little else than a single low frequency tone until 11:15, when a lower tone takes over. (Yes, it’s a different tone, not just lower.) And then the sandpaper is back. Intermittently. While the tone gets throbby and a quickly pulsating higher sound pulsates until it’s all we can hear. Then there’s two of them, one of which starts breaking up almost immediately. And again. (My favorite bit.) That takes us to 14:36, and a tone. Mid range. Some electronic tweeting. Scratching. High tones. Throbbing. Higher. Even higher than that. And LOUDER.

And we’re done.

If I’ve given you the impression of someone at the controls of a noise generating program, turning knobs, changing filters and wave shape patterns, then that’s exactly what I meant. If I’ve given you the impression that its insouciant randomness is pretty damned entertaining, then I meant that, too.

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Michel Chion, Dix-sept minutes. (MKCD032)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:07:21 +0000

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 inside a cathedral), water, dogs barking, and kids’ toys (at least that whirring sound near the beginning reminds me of a spinning toy I used to have—could also be a clock sound, yes). While a very different sound world from the credo and the gloria—except for a yell and some out-of-breath panting near the end—it has the all the variety and subtlety one associates with Chion.

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Lionel Marchetti, Train de nuit (Noord 3-683) (MKCD029)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:06:29 +0000

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, and bird sounds. You may be interested to know that there are bird calls and train whistles which resemble each other quite closely. Sonic ambiguities are just as interesting as poetic ones, and just as important.

There are some snippets of other pieces in this one, too, one of them so distorted that…

Well, listen to it for yourself; it’s fun.

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Jean-Francois Laporte, Mantra (MKCD028)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:05:55 +0000

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 by a long low drone, which carries the piece through the rest of its course. Along the way, other long sounds (either drones or rattles) join in, almost in such a way as to divide the piece into sections, the last with two distinct metallic spinning sounds, I mean three. Mantra evolves slowly, in long slow waves of great droning noise. And once the spinning stops…. Delicious!

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Maurizio Martusciello, Unsettled line (MKCD027)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:05:19 +0000

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 silence. And Martusciello gives you plenty of gaps, a quite efficient way to make each individual noise distinct. If you like your sounds naked, or only scantily clad, this is a great piece for you. If you like a richer mix, lots of different sounds sounding simultaneously, well, give this one a try, anyway. I think it’ll grow on you.

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eRikm, Frame (MKCD026)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:04:46 +0000

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 enough to make you feel like you’re hearing old friends, but not enough to sound like a rehash. Is it a good piece, all on it’s own? Quite definitely yes. In spite of the bits you’ll recognize, this piece definitely has it’s own character. If you’d never heard any of those other pieces, you’d think this was just a nice, smart, funny piece that you liked. I have heard those other pieces, and I never felt that they intruded on Frame. Well, maybe just the one…

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Lionel Marchetti, Le Grande Vallée (MKCD025)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:04:15 +0000

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. It’s a strange piece, alternately (or simultaneously) gloomy and companionable. Perhaps the most revealing thing one can say about it is that the voices at the end are shocking, because they’re normal, conversational voices.

The piece is headed by this exchange, from Chuang Tzu:

“Master, where are you going?” demanded Gustofwind.
“To the grand valley,” said Obscurethickness.
“Why?”
“The grand valley is the place where one pours without ever filling, and where one draws out without ever depleting.”

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Les Kristoff K. Roll, Des travailleurs de la nuit, à l’amie des objets (MKCD024)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:03:41 +0000

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 the extreme far end of speaking, at the line between speaking and singing, a crowd of people chanting. (“No pasaran.”) In between that and its reprise at the end of the piece are just about every kind of spoken voice—single voices, conversation, old people, children, men, women, laughing, yelling—and all set out as one would contrast voices in an orchestral piece, with tuttis and solos and small groups of instruments, with melodic and rhythmic variation, of course.

And no, listening to this piece, you will not ever be reminded of orchestral music, even with this review in your head. But I think you’ll perhaps savor voices, ordinary speaking voices, just a bit more than you did before listening to this.

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Bernhard Günter, impossible grey (MKCD023)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:03:09 +0000

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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Hervé Castellani, Deux Silences. (MKCD022)

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:02:18 +0000

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 crescendo and decrescendo in and out of each other, there are also several places where the sound just suddenly cuts out.

And just as suddenly cuts back in again. And some of the silences (inside each piece) are long enough to trick your ear into thinking the piece is over before it is. Although the two silences are quite different, they share at least one sound: falling water, which enters near the end of each one—rain in the first, and inside a showerstall in the other. Or so it sounds to me. Lovely stuff!

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