Afflux is Eric Cordier, Eric La Casa, and Jean-Luc Guionnet—all of them with other cds on Ground Fault, all of them very talented composer/performers. There are three tracks on this disc, and three men, but the pieces, so far as I can hear, do not reflect each individual. What happens here is one more instance of talented people, each with clearly discernable styles, working in tandem with other equally talented individuals to produce music that is clearly different from anything any of them do alone. Read more »

The first minute and a half of Altered Realities seems to be a minimal and slightly quirky bit of electroacoustic music. Near the end of that first 90 seconds, however, one begins to suspect that one has been listening to a rather long “hook,” and sure enough, a guitar enters playing a simple little tune over a soft wash of electronics. Fortunately, although the little guitar lick never goes away, the electronic wash continues to include odd little dissonant zips and zaps now and again—not quite enough to distract from the guitar licks, if you like that kind of thing, but also enough to hold your attention if you don’t.

Indeed, this album could easily pass, at a low enough volume, for another New Age offering. And throughout, there is this rather uneasy truce between the forces of regularity and consonance and the forces of interesting and quirky electronics. While the uneasiness is in itself a factor that keeps me coming back to this music, it’s definitely the quirks that hold me. Right under the surface, there’s a genuinely fascinating world of all sorts of strange little noises, if you give it your attention.

Give it your attention.

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Worksound is a new space in Portland for art and music. At the show on the 21^st of October, which included one of Portland’s new acquisitions from New York (Matt Hannafin), art from gallery co-owner Modou Dieng and others was hanging from their opening show a couple of months ago. It’s an interesting space, and while that particular art may not be there any more, chances are what is there whenever you go will be good, too. I have my suspicions that these people know what’s good! Read more »

The second annual Spectrum XXI festival will take place this November in Bruxelles, Paris, and Genève. If it’s anything like last year’s festival, and from the line-up it looks as if it will be, this is a festival you will not want to miss. Put on by Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram and featuring Tim Hodgkinson and Robert Reigle, among others, along with the Hyperion Ensemble, Spectrum XXI is a wild, and wildly various, survey of new music for electronics and ensemble, electronics and soloists, and just plain soloists (if you can think of people like Andrei Kivu and Monica Timofticiuc as “plain”!).

At the end of the report on last year’s festival, you can see a portion from the press release for this year’s festival.

The first annual Spectrum XXI festival took place in Paris from the 15^th to the 23^rd of November 2006. The title word, by the way, is a pun—referring not only to the broad spectrum of new music presented at this festival, but to the spectral music favored particularly by Romanian and French composers. Last year’s festival began, in true French fashion, with a conference on spectral music, to which I was invited, more because I’d met Iancu at Bourges the preceding spring and he’d liked me than for any musicological reasons, I suspect. Not that I haven’t picked up an idea or two in a half century of listening to music (most of which has been spent listening to twentieth century music). And I must say that the real musicologists there, and the real musicians, were all very gracious and welcoming. Read more »

It’s the 2^nd of October, 2007. We get to Valentine’s early, but already a small table set up in front of the bar’s only window is covered with synthesizers and other electronic devices, microphones, and a large metal salad bowl with crumpled-up bits of tin foil in it. Two gourds rest on the floor beside one of the two chairs. If looks are any guide, this looks to be an interesting concert. Of course, we have heard Matt Marble and J.P. Jenkins before, though never together. That’s a new twist of Portland New Music Society founder Brandon Conway for the 2007-2008 season. Read more »

“There’s a lot of great music out there that people don’t know about and should know about”

You may know Erik Hoffman as one half of Spastic Colon, whose latest album should be out soon, perhaps by the time you read this. You may know Erik Hoffman as the founder of Ground Fault Recordings, which has put out consistently high quality music covering a wide range of styles. You may have used the distinctive cover art of the Ground Fault albums to make your trollings for good music almost completely risk free. You may also enjoy gourmet coffee and tables being unexpectedly turned.

If any or all of these are true, here’s an interview you may want to read, an interview that took place at Polly’s Coffee in Long Beach, an excellent place, by the way, to satisfy your cravings for a perfect brew. Read more »

The 2007 No Fun Fest at the Hook in Brooklyn covered four nights, but my schedule only allowed me two, and jet lag (the great universal excuse) made me bail early on the second evening—meaning I missed Meate and Oblivia, Tom Recchion, Ju Suk Reet, Keijo Haino, and Merzbow. If you were there for all of it, please feel free to write us with your impressions, and together we can make a review that does the festival some justice.

In the meantime, evening two, my first, opened with Charlie Draheim, whose set cast a long shadow over the succeeding acts. I attended this with some friends for whom this was their first experience of noise artists, and his rich, dark sound was very pleasing to them. Read more »

Ferreyra is that rare composer whose output can be genuinely described as protean. This can be most convincingly heard on the Chrysopée Electronique-Bourges cd, also called “the green album.” Two pieces are from the seventies (1972 and 74); three are from the eighties (1985, 86, and 87), and they couldn’t be more different from each other.
Souffle d’un petit Dieu distrait opens with some microtonal weaving, which broadens out into a very quick oscillation, over which a variety of gestures begin to orbit. That gradually changes into descending figures, which are replaced (smoothly and gradually) by spacious dark swoops of sounds. Not until almost halfway through are there silences separating the sounds—a change that’s quite startling, even though the sounds are the same as we’ve been hearing for the past five minutes. It’s a simple effect that’s simply effective: you cannot help but start to listen more closely to each event when they’re separated by silences. Even after the music goes back to a continuous flow, you still feel very much on the qui vive, so that the last few minutes, which reverse the opening minutes of the piece, sound much more dramatic and engaging, even though the music is getting quieter and simpler. The very ending is simply perfect. Read more »

Written for a four cd collection of pieces inspired by the seasons (Les Saisons–LCD 2781126-27-28-29), Le chemin du vent des glaces is one of two pieces by Ferreyra on this set, Siesta Blanca being the other. Le chemin du vent des glaces covers a lot of ground in its only eleven minutes of rich and varied sound, so much so that I’m always taken aback when it ends so soon.

From its dramatic opening, great explosive sounds in the distance with short fragments of hiss in the foreground, to the various overlapping wind sounds mixed with all sorts of clicks and clatters and rumbling, and some of the sounds from the opening, to the shocking sound of a cork pulled out of a bottle and a drink being poured—over ice, of course—which introduces a section of people talking and laughing, and then back to the austere beauties that characterize the bulk of this piece, it’s a thrilling excursion, one you’ll want to take over and over again.

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The date for Demeures aquatiques which makes it early (earliest?) in Ferreyra’s career. It does not promise great things to come, as many composers early pieces do. It is simply a great thing that’s already here. The shifting from channel to channel, so easy to be gimmicky, is so adroit and so musical in this piece, that that one thing is almost worth the price of admission all on its own. But it’s not about technique that I want to talk, though that’s certainly impressive enough, but of the music. The piece moves slowly and gorgeously and naturally, the sounds and the motives unfolding out of each other so organically that listening to this piece move through time is like experiencing a cycle of growth and decay out in nature somewhere. In only seven minutes, this piece creates an incredible sense of spaciousness. Unbelieveable.

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