L'étoile absinthe first appeared on a Metamkine 3" disc, reviewed here, part of that label's Cinéma pour l'oreille series. Although these two pieces are separated by four years (2000 and 2004, respectively), Bokanowski considers them as companion pieces, so it is not ...
writing about music for people who like music
Author Archives: Michael E. Karman
Ostrava Days 2009
It is truly amazing after all these years, over a hundred of them, how fresh and new Ives' The Unanswered Question still sounds. At the 2009 Ostrava Days festival, this piece was performed as perfectly as one could ask for, leaving only the one ...
Acousma
Robert Scott Thompson writes a lot of ambient music. He also writes a lot of electroacoustic music, like you would have heard in Bourges back in the day, and indeed some of it was done in the studios in Bourges. Acousma is a blend of ...
Ghost Words
Robert Scott Thompson is a composer who, like Phillip Werren, had until recently flown entirely under my radar. Only by ordering a CD from Aucourant of music by Erdem Helvacioğlu did I become aware of Thompson. So now, just in case that, as with ...
Ludger Brümmer
[The first part of this interview was made in 2006 in Montréal at a festival for the 80th anniversary of Francis Dhomont.] Asymmetry: I first heard your music on the Ex machina CD with La cloches sans vallées. The music is so ...
A Ludger Brümmer Miscellany
TroTropforT - 1987 TroTropforT builds slowly and then breaks off suddenly. It starts up again with similar material, then breaks off again except for some quiet stuff to which are eventually added some clangs; but it goes on mostly quite quietly, with hollow little sounds and ...
Ricardo Mandolini
Asymmetry: I noticed in the concert last night that the piece that preceded yours was a kind of compendium, a collection of all the electroacoustic tropes of the last 60 years. It was like a little history of electroacoustic music. And then yours came along, and ...
Mandolini miscellany
Cancion de madera y agua A rattle of rachets to start, morphing in and out of various other sounds, without ever losing the rachety quality, until some low frequency thumps anchor things. After a short pause, the same mechanical logic begins to ...
2010 Truax Retrospectives
Barry Truax's involvement with electroacoustics goes back to 1949, although perhaps the early seventies is a more realistic date for the beginning of his involvement as a composer. Time enough, in any case, for there to be retrospective concert of his music, starting with the ...
Madeleine Shapiro
Asymmetry: You've been involved with new music since your college days. How did all that get started? Shapiro: I was introduced to new music as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook by Paul Zukovsky, who was my mentor. I don’t ...