In fact, so many cool things came out in 2010, I’m tempted to do a Favorites of 2010, regardless. But first, 2011.

Hemmelig Tempo, Who Put John Cage on the Guestlist?

Of course. We just reviewed this CD. Of course it’s a favorite. The clip this time is from the title track.

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New Jersey Laptop Orchestra, The Willingness to be Touched

Also of course. Also already reviewed. Its clip this time is also from its title track.

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Radio Royal, Radio Royal

These guys were part of a splendid all day electroacoustic bash that preceded the 2011 Ostrava Days Festival, a report of which will appear some time soon. I enjoyed their live set, but I enjoyed their CD even more. How often does that happen?

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Chaya Czernowin, Shifting Gravity

Czernowin’s music has intrigued me for several years, and this latest release of hers is no exception. Very likable music, easy to listen to over and over again. A fascination with sound, and with silence, that I find endlessly pleasurable. The clip is from the last track, Winter Songs III for ensemble and electronics.

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Ernst Krenek, Symphony no. 4

Older music than Asymmetry usually talks about, but such a long overdue release of really fine European mid-century music, that we couldn’t resist. The other four symphonies have been available for many years, and the vast stylistic gulf between numbers three and five has made me keen to find out about number four.

Fortunately, four is like five.

The clip is from the Allegro pesante.

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Quartet for the End of Space

I suppose that since the late sixties, this title has been inevitable for an album. I’m surprised it hasn’t been used earlier, it’s such a natural.

That’s not why I bought this CD, of course. Along the bottom of the CD are four names, Pauline Oliveros, Francisco López, Doug Van Nort, and Jonas Branch. I’d never heard of the last two, but the first two were enough to send me reaching for my wallet.

Each composer has two pieces on this disc, and I’d say that seven out of the eight tracks are very fine pieces. Never mind which one I didn’t particularly care for; your list of likes and dislikes is bound to be different from mine, anyway.

The clip is from Cyber Talk by Pauline Oliveros.

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Francisco López, untitled #244

I know of two 2011 releases by Francisco López; this is the only one I have heard. It’s made up of recordings underwater and above water on the Paraná and Paraguay rivers. It’s quite a lot less watery than you might expect. It’s just as rich and strange and satisfying as you might expect. The sounds are wonderful as are the long silences (approximately two, three, and five minutes long, each).

The clip is from almost three minutes in to about five minutes in.

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John Cage, The Works for Percussion I

Not to take anything away from any of the other CDs in mode’s Cage series, but this one is pretty special. The Percussion Group Cinncinnati plays these pieces–the five Imaginary Landscapes and Credo in Us–better than anyone else I’ve ever heard. Solid technique and perfect sense of style, beginning with (but by no means ending there!) the decision to use the original variable speed turntables and 78 test records that Cage specified. I don’t care how many Cage recordings you already have; you have to have this one, too. I mean it!

As is appropriate for this music, there are multiple versions of several of the pieces (Two performances each of Credo in Us and Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and two realizations of Imaginary Landscape No. 5).

The clip is from what I consider the first piece of the second era of the twentieth century, Imaginary Landscape No. 1.

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Simon Steen-Andersen, Pretty Sound

The first solo album by one of the more inventive and original composers of the 21st century.

I first heard “Pretty Sound (Up and Down)” in concert. I was quite taken with this piece. Since than, I’ve heard several other pieces by Steen-Andersen, in concert and on recordings. I want more. (There are three other 2011 releases that include his music, on order as I write this.)

The clip is from On and Off and To and Fro, for saxophone, cello and three players with megaphones.

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With the exception of tracks five and six, which merge into each other, each track on this CD is quite distinct and different. But what I have to say about this album is how the tracks resemble each other. That is, all the tracks aside from the last one, track 8, A Study Dedicated to Arne Nordheim. With that exception, these exceptional tracks each create the sensation of movement. Each track, furthermore, goes several different places, unexpected places. Unexpected, but, in hindsight, inevitable.

Quite a cool thing to have pulled off.

But wait, there’s more! Each track (always with the exception of track eight, which is exceptionally exceptional) is full of incident and variety, but none of them ever seem rushed or “busy.” I’m not sure how they did this, but a careful listen to any track reveals that it takes very little time to establish a “line” and even repeat it at leisure. Seconds only.

And what is there to hear on this disc? All sorts of lovely and intriguing things, old school electronic blips and bleeps, radio broadcast stuff à la Crawling With Tarts, new school electronic noises, glitch sounds, turntable sounds, more sounds–all your favorite stuff, all very poised, all very skillfully crafted and beautifully presented.

A exceptionally satisfying disc.

From track seven, Notes from Professor Fokuda’s Mountain Seminar.

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Emmilig Tempo is Eugene Guribye (Professor Waffel), Gunnar Innvær (Doktor Døv), and Håvard Pedersen (Professor Fukoda-san). Cover art by Loulou and Tummie.

Kasem: Musique electroacoustic with formal esthetics.

Asymmetry: Without instruments.

Kasem: Yes. Well, there are instruments in the mix, but not in real time.

Asymmetry: When did you start composing?

Kasem: At twenty-four or twenty-five years old. I started earlier than that with the violin, as interpreter. And then I needed to express myself further on, not only as a player. It was a necessity for me. I wanted two things–to be a violinist and to be a composer. I think that it is important for a composer to play.

Asymmetry: Yes. In fact, most of the composers I know are people who are also players. And I think that’s good.

Kasem: Now I am a living artist. The day I will not be alive, maybe another person will play my music. But, of course, it is possible that in this very same moment another person could be interested in playing my music.

Asymmetry: How did you get started composing?

Kasem: I played the violin, which I like very much. I played in an orchestra in the Colon theater at Buenos Aires, but I got a little tired playing pieces all the time for orchestra. I felt that something was absent. And it was a special moment in my life full of changes, a spiritual moment; it was a necessity for me to express myself, but through my own personal music….

And that moment I knew Alejandro Iglesias-Rossi and it was great, because he told me “you do not have to study the formal technique of composition, you have to compose.” And for me, that was a great moment because I needed to fly alone. It was so imperative as necessity to compose, that it was a matter of life or death. For me it was like salvation.

Asymmetry: When you were playing violin, before you started composing, were you playing living composers, new music?

Kasem: No. I played substantially Bach. It’s great, but when you play Bach, there is the possibility of making mistakes, because it’s not your music. When I play my own music, I don’t make mistakes, because I’m the person who did the piece. There’s no possibility of making a mistake.

Niebla y luz

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Asymmetry: I know a lot of musicians who play older music only; they never play new music. And it seems like for those people, the way they treat their instrument is not respectful. Because it’s always the technique–for playing Brahms or for playing Beethoven. It’s always the technique for playing a certain kind of music.

Kasem: The same global technique with no renewal conduces to play the same type of music.

Asymmetry: And there are so many things you can do with a violin that are outside that technique. It seems like if you really love your instrument, if you really love music, you will want to do other things.

I remember the first time I saw a violinist move the bow up and down the strings rather than across them. Of course!

Kasem: All those things are good. I am not saying that you don’t have to study classical music, but it’s not the only way to play. There are lots of ways to play the violin beyond the occidental technique. I am South American, but my grandfathers are Albanian and Armenian and those traditions give me another way to make music with the violin. Why does America have to copy the music, the technique of another place all the time? American natives have techniques, too, that can be used to play the violin.

In my life I want to do what I want, what I love, not what another person says is good for me.

Asymmetry: When you started composing, you composed for violin first?

Kasem: Yes.

Asymmetry: So how did you go on to electroacoustic?

Kasem: I don’t know.

Asymmetry: “I don’t know”? That’s not good enough! [Laughter]

Kasem: It was a mistake. [More laughter]

It was very strange. I started doing a piece for bandoneon. I started to play a bandoneon, learned how to make sounds with it. And then I put all that into the computer, along with some other things. And I thought it sounded good.

The world of electroacoustics is another world; it is the world of imagination. And I love imagination. So I made a piece with the bandoneon, and I got a premiere, and I won a prize in an acousmatic competition. This encouraged me to continue composing this kind of music. Since that time, I have done a lot of other things. Electroacoustic with live instruments, what we call “mixed music”, for example. Apart from that I continue composing for instruments. I love instruments!

Asymmetry: Before you started composing had you listened to a lot of electroacoustic music?

Kasem: Yes, I did, and I appreciated particularily the pieces of Iglesias Rossi and Mandolini. I really liked electroacoustic music by Ricardo Mandolini. It has a special feeling to it.

Asymmetry: So then you studied composition with Ricardo.

Kasem: Yes, I think Ricardo is one of the most important composers at this moment. Because he has everything in place, technique, form, and heart/spirit. My home is in Buenos Aires, but I will be living in France for two or three years more, studying in Lille with Ricardo.

His music is like a journey. He starts in one place and goes to another world. You can close your eyes and travel to another world. I think his music has a fundamental heart. In this moment, composers have to reconnect with heart. For many years contemporary music showed no heart, it seemed to be done for only a certain group of people. I think contemporary music has to be for people of the world, people that need a change in their life. I would like with my music to be able to transform a person who is in the world, to help somebody who is lost to find himself. I don’t know if I can change something with my music, but I am interested in human beings. I am not interested either in narcissist poses or in small elites where the composers congratulate each other for their music. I think in terms of people who need expression, and for them I would like to do something… popular!

I don’t think I’m just a composer. I am interested in arts and creation in general, not only in the musical field but also in poetry, painting, theater. Creation is life for me. In this field I know that I have learn a lot, I have to live, I have to know a lot of other things. I am also doing a PhD in France concerning spirituality in composition.

Asymmetry: What’s next for you?

Kasem: I’m working on another piece, Los cielos infinitos (The infinite heavens). This piece continues Las aguas abismales (The abyssal waters), the piece that was awarded in Bourges.

Las aguas abismales

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Los cielos infinitos

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Next I will compose Pacha Mama (Mother earth). The three pieces, Las aguas abismales, Los cielos Infinitos and Pacha mama constitue a triptych named Vuelo Iniciático (Initiatic fly).

Asymmetry: It’s interesting that you can finish a piece and then realize you’re not finished, yet.

Kasem: Composing the triptych I realized how creation is relative to life. Both show the continuity of chained experiences.

I think my pieces have too much of my life, how I am at that moment. There are a lot of things that are new to me at this moment. I think that it is not casual that I’m composing the piece Los cielos infinitos at this moment.

You feel that a part of you goes into a piece, but suddenly that piece is not you anymore; it’s another thing. You made it, but then it goes its own way.

And I think that is a good thing.

Next was Eric La Casa, with a mélange of people talking, traffic sounds, low frequency rumbles, bird sounds, and miscellaneous very small sounds very amplified. What really struck me in this set was the combination of really loud front stage sounds (especially drums) and really soft back- or even offstage sounds. Very disorienting, and I mean that in a good way.

La Casa was one of the reasons I had been keen to attend the 2009 Densités, and the next set was another–a trio of Sophie Agnel, Lionel Marchetti, and Jérôme Noetinger. I had heard Marchetti and Noetinger in a spectacular evening of electronics and video in Bourges a couple of years before, out at Emmetrop, so was looking forward to hearing them again. Lionel and Jérôme were solid. Lots of very small sounds extremely amplified and some sudden loud harsh outbursts. I didn’t think that the piano part fit in with all that, or not consistently. Too much of pitches and chords. But she did make a lot of excruciating noises, too, with various toys in the harp, so pretty satisfying all round.

Burkhard Bein’s set started out quite minimally, just a ratchet sound and nothing else. Too soon it left that–too soon for me, anyway. Where it went was very interesting, no argument there. I wasn’t sorry for that. I did want more of the “nothing,” though. (My clip of the ratchet part was overwhelmed by the creaking of my chair that my camera picked up. Schade.)

That first day ended with a noisy set by Jazkamer. That’s all I wrote about it at the time: “Jazkamer is noisy.” A satisfying end to a long and delightful day of music making.

Next day began with John Tilbury. His first set was very simple and assured. Lots of silence. Simple lines. Quite mesmerizing. The second was a bit busier, with talking, preparations, and extra instruments. All of it music to sink into and let it take you wherever it will. This was the first time I had heard Tilbury live. Not the last, though, fortunately.

For all its activity, and there was a lot, the trumpet and saxophone duo of Birgit Ulher and Heddy Boubaker was remarkably static. I mean that in only a good way. What it meant for me was that in spite of all the various things going on, I could easily focus on anything at any time, without feeling I was being shoved along to the next thing and the next. Some of the anythings I especially enjoyed were the different mutes and “mutes” that Birgit held up against the bell of the trumpet; the metal thing that she made to buzz by just barely touching the bell with it was nice, and the feedback mute was even nicer!

Next up were Phil Minton and Isabelle Duthoit, and if anyone had told me that anything could distract me from what Phil was doing, I wouldn’t have believed them. But that is exactly what happened this afternoon. According to my notes, Isabelle’s vocal pyrotechnics were all I seemed to have noticed in this concert.

This was followed by another voice+ concert, which was too bad. Natacha Muslera and Damien Schultz were also good, but Isabelle was such a tough act to follow. I’m sure I would have been much more impressed with Natacha and Muslera if they hadn’t had to play back to back with Phil and Isabelle.

In between those two shows, I stopped by a cool installation by Armel Plunier (with Laurent Albert) that ran throughout the day. “Les Poupées Machines.” I could talk about it, but the video will speak for it much better. (And there are even better videos than mine on youtube, too. Check the ones uploaded by bibou38.)

That evening opened with a solo percussion set by Robbie Avenaim, yet another talented new music guy from Australia, a country that has been churning them out recently like crazy sauce. Really interesting blend of virtuousity and automatic music (human playing and machine playing).

Then there was another “trumpet+” set, this time Greg Kelley and Jason Lescalleet, in which Jason walked slowly around with portable recorders and set them down in various parts of the room, all while recording and playing back with them. And then spent his time going from one machine to the next on tables behind Greg, who also controlled some machines along with supplying cool trumpet noises for the machines to process. Fun to watch, but even more fun to hear. Nice metallic buzzing action with the trumpet and seriously noisy.

The last day of the festival started out with two radically different but both extremely delightful events, an installation/concert by Burkhard Beins and a high-powered, grab you by the throat Hairy Bones concert with Peter Brötzmann, Toshinori Kondo, Paal Nilssen-Love, and Massimo Pupillo.

That there are four clips of Beins and only one of Brötzmann says nothing about the esteem in which I hold these two musicians. Just so you know.

The 2010 visit was bedevilled by technical glitches–Asymmetry‘s recording device inadvertantly destroyed and the text files of reporting on the concerts corrupted. But we did manage to salvage a few comments, enough to show that the 2010 festival was every bit as good as the 2009 one, enough to make us very sad we were unable to attend in 2011.

One highlight of the 2010 festival was the duo of C. Spencer and Okkyung Lee with the addition of Sean Baxter. This trio was visceral and intense. The balloon inflated under the strings of the cello added to that atmosphere, though unfortunately the inevitable “pop!” was not as jarring as one might have hoped.

This was, however, music with a clear sense of purpose, a sense that in no way sacrificed the wildness of free improvisation. Gorgeous!

Jean-Francois Laporte’s Waves was performed with a homemade instrument, all tubes and stuff, with a little plastic-balled striker for one and controls to control the frequencies and amplitudes of each. The sounds ranged from low-level, refrigerator-type noises to buzz saw and then harpy-like screeching. You say that harpies are mythical beasts? Well, just imagine.

For the next piece, Jean-Francois stood on a box in the middle of the audience and swung another (smaller) homemade contraption around. It sounded like one of those howly sticks but engineered for much more variety of tones. It looked like a large metal bee and as he swung it, passed by within inches of people’s heads. The audience clearly was paying attention. Much easier not to drift off when your life is at stake!

In any event, classic Laporte: droning with incredible variation.

Germ Studies featured the guzheng, an ancient Chinese harp, and a synthesizer. Short pieces, mostly in the upper register; delicate but impossible to destroy. Intricate rhythms at the edge of perception. The harp more than held its own against the synthesizer.

http://www.myspace.com/germstudies

And there was a diffusion by Lionel Marchetti of Book II of Trilogie de la Mort by Eliane Radigue. Classic Radigue!

With any luck at all, we’ll be able to make it to the festival in 2012.

There’s a fairly wide stylistic range in this CD, not surprising, given the technology used. As with musique concrète, whose tropes are being rediscovered and reused, laptops allow and perhaps even encourage putting anything together with anything else. So it is in this disc, with bits and pieces of all sorts of musics–even a tiny wisp of country/western, I’m sure of it!–along with speech and electronic noises and all the rest.

Also, as with musique concrète and synthesizer and Kyma and symphony orchestra and piano and any other machines, the machine encourages certain kinds of behavior. For my tastes, there was a little too much of the loop in this. (But I thought that of Yoshihide and Sachiko M’s Warhol Memory Disorder, too, and no one’s going to think of those two as anything but giants of new music.) And too much of the drum machine. But those are personal quibbles. Someone else might find those things the best part of the disc.

In any case, there’s a lot of variety from cut to cut, some like turntablism, some like music concrète, some like Crawling With Tarts, some like mashups, some like old-fashioned jazz or rock jams. The clip is from track 9, “Mistah Cage Struts,” which along with track 10 uses sound bites from the 1960 performance of Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret.” (If you haven’t seen that, yet, by the way, you’re in for a real treat. You might want to watch that before you listen to this clip, or at least before you listen to this album, which I would recommend you do!

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Jean-Louis Dhermy’s Pauéphonê also did a fair amount of starting and stopping, and was also mostly quite soft. The one moment when the sound was loud (a kind of drumming on wooden tubes sound) was also the one moment when he used the rear speakers, too. Very simple. Very effective. In the preceding piece of that concert, Florent Clolautti’s A fleur de peau, there was a more subtle (disturbingly so) use of speakers–there were places where there were some swirly sounds, but they did not move around the speakers, something I expected given the nature of the sounds.

Two interesting and effective uses of multiple speakers.

And while there were a lot of nice other things on this first day, including another first live hearing for me–Chion’s 17 minute long Dix-sept minutes, the highlight of the day was Warhol Memory Disorder 11 by Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M. Slow, soft wind sounds and art gallery conversations interrupted by bursts of loud electronic mayhem. What fun!

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Day two started off with some Dhomont, always welcome. Corps et âme. There was more Chion, On n’arrête pas les regret, the Bokanowski Trois chambres, and a piece by Vincent Laubeuf, Seuil terrítoires, that had a lot of resonant metal sounds, cymbals and kettle lids and the like, done like I’d never heard them done before. I was intrigued by how many pieces used metal sounds–I have noticed in other festivals other examples of dominant patterns (regardless of any theme for the show). My favorite was a year at Bourges where it seemed that every other piece featured an accordion in some way or other.

On n’arrête pas le regret

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The piece I had most looked forward to hearing on the third day was Lo inefable by Maria Cristina Kasem, whose mentor Ricardo Mandolini had praised her highly to me the year before and whose solo violin piece, which she had played in Växjö some months before, had so wowed me. (Scroll down to the first video clip.) Fortunately, Kasem’s piece was in every way satisfying. It opens with the sound of air forced through an accordion. Once more. Exhale, inhale. Then some very soft singing comes in and then a low frequency rumble under that. As the rumble continues, the (singing) voice turns into breathing, and all the other elements return as well for a powerful and engaging ending for an engaging and powerful piece.

Futura ’09 was a very satisfying weekend on the whole. I just wish I could manage to get to this festival more often than once every three years.

Chant d’ombre starts with some very deep sounds, not too loud but very powerful. There’s one climax, about six minutes in, and then the rest of the piece is fairly quiet but clearly still very powerful, like an idling diesel engine, say. It is largely made up of long, long drones. As is only appropriate for a piece dedicated to Eliane Radigue. And like Eliane’s music, Chant d’ombre is full of subtle variety. Infinite and infinitely subtle.

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If you already have the Metamkine 3″ disc, it might seem a bit expensive to buy this Optical Sound disc for only 24 minutes of music. But it’s only 11€ from Metamkine, and how else are you to get the very splendid Chant d’ombre? For those of you who have neither, but who enjoy fine music that gets more and more enjoyable each listen, this disc would be a genuine bargain at twice the price.

By all reports, I missed one of the coolest sets, a big, noisy piece by Phill Niblock out at some factory or other. But I did get to see Phill’s Disseminate, in which Robin Hayward sat on the little “stage” in a club and did his wizardry with his tuba, while Daniel Costello, French Horn, and Daniel Ploeger, trombone, wandered about the club. All the sounds were also being sent to various speakers around the room. At the second pass of the trombone past me, the sound coming out of the speaker nearest me was from the French Horn. (The clip is from before the Daniels began their wanderings.)

Also pretty splendid was Joseph Kudirka’s Renascence for voice and instruments. The vocal part (sung by Thomas Buckner) is a fairly simple line that just goes on over and over. The instruments do whatever. So simple, so effective And more than effective, magical. The incantatory repetition of the voice against the the total freedom of the instruments worked perfectly. This was one of the brightest moments of the festival for me.

Also magical was Christian Wolff’s For 1,2, and 3 People from 1964. In case we’d forgotten just how cool the 60′s were. The three people were Thomas Buckner, voice, Christian Wolff, piano, and Julio Laitinen, cello.

Tom and Christian were also part of an improvisation set (with nine other people as the OD Improvisation Ensemble). This one included some wandering around (by Tom Buckner and Daniel Ploeger) which was part of the music, and which included dragging some chairs out onto the stage. At the very end, after everyone had finished playing, Daniel, who had been the most peripatetic, walked over and sat down in one of them. Nice ending!

More Wolff for the closing concert, his Rhapsody for 3 Orchestras, part of Petr Kotick’s project to get people who don’t ordinarily write for orchestra, like Alvin Lucier and Elliott Sharp, to do big orchestral pieces. I know this is a favorite project of Petr’s, and I’m sure that these composers welcome the chance to write for this instrument, though I have noticed that very few orchestral pieces nowadays manage to sound like anything but just another big orchestral piece. Some strings, then some brass, them some percussion. Then the winds. All familiar sounds. We’ve heard it all before. But Wolff’s piece was pretty interesting. Each group gets a conductor, and there are many unconducted bits. Some of the conducted bits sounded random; some of the unconducted bits sounded coordinated. (Only some.) And some times one conductor’s gestures seemed coordinated with what players were doing in another group.

There were many smaller ensembles throughout the festival, of course. Elliott Sharp and Robin Hayward had some solo sets that were to die for. Very few people have Sharp’s chops on electric guitar, which is saying a lot as everyone and his mother play electric guitar. Fewer people play tuba, it’s true, but Hayward would still be among the best, no matter what. This is as good as it gets.

First set
Second set

Hayward set

Only remains to mention that the performance of Varese’s Ameriques (the original version, I’m pretty sure) was spectacular. I would’t mind hearing this live more than once. Probably this will have been the only time, however. At least it was played as well as could be possibly imagined. And there was an evening of the Amandinda Percussion Group, whose recordings of Cage’s percussion pieces have been delighting me for many years. Their performance of Four4 was to all intents and purposes a genuinely spiritual experience. They played it in almost complete darkness and with love and passion for each sound.

Each CD has six pieces, ranging from the brief 6:15 of Tagmene to the majestic 20:30 of Fog Index. And while there are many of the same sounds from piece to piece–the inside of a piano or a hard-edged harpsichord sound (both of which I associate, for better or worse, with Buchla) as well as variously altered voices and other acoustic instruments–Thompson has no trouble building a distinct personality for each of the dozen pieces here.

And speaking of familiar sounds, The Widening Gyre is an example of a piece that uses old school electronic noises–a tricky thing to pull off, but quite refreshing when done well, as it is here. Old sounds, new contexts. A very resonant and front-stage kind of work, The Widening Gyre is over way too soon.

I thought that about The Gramophone, too, that it was over long before I was ready for it to be. This piece uses voice sounds a lot, and I was intrigued by the difference in quality between the voices at the end from those at the beginning, as if the orginal, acoustic voices used were from two very different groups of people. (I’m just trying to give an impression here, not a description. There was apparently only one person’s voice used for all the various vocal sounds, whether individual or choral.) Also intriguing was how at one point a gesture is repeated, then grows into a phrase, and eventually simply becomes the next section, as it were, of the piece.

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Fog Index has an even more intriguing structural logic. The first half of the piece is all piano sounds–plucks, strums, chords–and very resonant voices until one very large piano chord that fades very slowly. After an insect chorus of voices grows out of that, and fades, there is no obvious voice or piano sound for the rest of the piece until the very end, when the voices and the jangly piano harp sounds briefly return. I had the impression, however, that the materials for the second half were all the same as for the first half, just less recognizable.

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Piano is not the only acoustic instrument to figure in Thompson’s pieces. There are also violin, cello, flutes, clarinet, and guitar, all duly acknowledged in the booklet. My favorite of these (of the instrument sounds not the acknowledgements) is The Ninth Wave, which is full of all sorts of rich and various sounds, from the hum of a distant prop plane to some giant thuds from equally gigantic drums. And string sounds: a violin gesture, some lovely slapping and scraping of a cello, and a section that sounds like a string quartet has been invited to an electroacoustic party (and electrified so that they’ll fit right in, of course). The electrocello flurries around eight minutes in are almost worth the price of admission all on their own.

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And I almost want to say the same for the opening of Elemental Folklore, too. It opens with a brief crescendo, then the merest hint of a decrescendo–enough to seduce you into thinking everything is calming down generallly, and then there’s a sudden loud clang. Very cool bit of aural misdirection, there.

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All in all, quite an enjoyable sampling of this fairly prolific composer’s electroacoustic oeuvre.

[One of the pieces on this album, Acouasm, may be heard in its entirety on the Art of the States site.]

Ghost Words is a four movement suite–Orgone, Shadow of Water on Sky, Sanctum, and Ghost Words After Tree Fall–that plays seamlessly, though the movements are easily distinguishable, and would be even without tracks. Orgone is made up of various short electronic phrases, including some moderately processed voices, over accompanying drones. Shadow of Water on Sky, on the other hand, is made up solely of long, interweaving lines. Sanctum opens with some fairly quiet clangs, but so different are they from the slow weaving of Shadow, that the opening to Sanctum is quite startling. Otherwise, Sanctum combines the long lines (but less weaving) of Shadow with the phrases over drone idea of Orgone to create its own sound world. While it also has voices among its more defined, metallic noises, it differs from Orgone in having longer “melodic” lines.

Ghost Words After Trees Fall opens as Sanctum did, with a clang, but a much larger, louder, more complex clang. Indeed, everything here, including the quiet things, is more direct and distinct than anything in the other movements. Everything is more forceful and overt.

Thompson’s sounds will be familiar to anyone who has heard any amount of electroacoustic music, but his way of using those sounds is his and no one else’s. I don’t think anyone would mistake his music for that of anyone else. I’m not sure how to put that impression into words, but certainly part of Thompson’s quality for me is his transparency and simplicity. There are rarely more than two or three different things going on at once, and each thing as clear and distinct as anything in Webern, say, or Satie. Clean and pure.

I found everything to be quite engaging.

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[The clip is from the opening minutes of Ghost Words After Tree Fall.]