Misc .9

Overview of Entr'acte E84, and thus, a mention of Grumbles, Lapses in Paris Transatlantic Magazine.

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E84 is an entertaining if rather uneven compilation showcasing the music of five different younger composers. Greek dronemeister Mecha/Orga aka Yiorgis Sakellariou's latest offering is brief (as is usually the case with Sakellariou, the title – 8:36 – is also the duration) and, for once, refreshingly active, his trademark sustained tones here embellished with a frosting of jangling metallic strings originating from what sounds like it could be some kind of zither. The timbre is mid-90s Paul Panhuysen, but the harmony is mid-70s Steve Reich – though there's nothing wrong with that, as far as I'm concerned.
London-based musique concrète composer Adam Asnan (though I see he still uses "acousmatic" to describe his work) studied with Denis Smalley, but the rough surface friction juxtaposed with raw field recordings of his Grumbles, Lapses (2009) would seem to indicate he's as familiar with recent developments in improvised music from Tokyo and Berlin (both Burkhard Beins and Taku Unami come to mind) as he is with the back catalogue of François Bayle.
Pauwel De Buck is one of a number of fine sound artists based in and around Ghent in Belgium, in whose Sint-Lukas art school he made some of the field recordings used as the basis for 2008's Neenah Foundry. The others hail from the courtyard of a nearby apartment building, the inspiration for the work being the contrast between the two sound environments. "Due to the enclosed nature of these spaces, the surrounding sounds of the city were heavily filtered," he writes. "Only a residue was audible in the courtyard. The overpopulated cafeteria, in combination with its bad acoustics, created a complex frame of sound reflections and textures." The source sounds have obviously been mucked about with and seriously treated, but they're still recognisable (just), and carefully edited into a coherent and satisfying 18-minute span of music.
Field recordings are also used as raw material in Tone Change on Pops' Farm (2008), by New York-based Joshua Convey, who's also a member of EAI outfit Fessenden with Steven Hess and Stephen Fiehn. I'm not sure if that apostrophe in the title is in the right place, but every sound in Convey's 11-minute composition certainly is, from the inscrutable rattles and roar of passing traffic that try to obscure the delicate pedal points and sustained harmonies to the distant guitar strumming left behind in their wake.
The odd man out here among the knob twiddlers and mouse clickers is Adrián Democ, a young composer hailing from Slovakia who studied across the border in the Czech Republic in Brno. His Dve prosby ("Two prayers") (2003–4) is a traditionally-scored five-minute song setting for soprano, flute and string quartet, in a rather airy live recording somewhat marred by audience noise. I'm tempted to refrain from making the usual remarks about dour, Eastern European new (neo-?) classical music, but let's just say Shostakovich still casts a long shadow. It would be nice to hear more of Democ's work, but not in the company of electronic music that far outshines it in terms of recording quality.

http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2010/05may_text.html#4