I’d say that Arturo Parra is a visionary in the best sense of this definition. Mixing classical guitar with shadows and lights evocated by some of the “acousmatic big names” (Stéphane Roy, Mauricio Bejarano, Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau) the Colombian composer — who plays a mean guitar, by the way — created five beautiful pieces about lucid dreams and fantastic imagery, involving us with a kind of music that I really could not even remotely compare with anything else that I know. While some of the final results fuse highly skilled technique and electroacoustic refractions bringing lots of fantastic colours to the mix, the dark/grey — almost spectral — sounds of Soledad, with the guitar body parts singled and transformed into a condition of human desolation and desperate thoughts, stand out among the rest to make us feel frozen to the ground.

Suite à un travail d’une décennie autour de la guitare et de la musique contemporaine, Arturo Parra se consacre aujourd’hui principalement à la composition d’œuvres originales. Il travaille notamment en collaboration avec des électroacousticiens avec qui il crée des œuvres pour guitare et bandes magnétiques.

Sur cet album, à la superbe pochette riche en informations sur l’artiste et ses œuvres, Arturo Parra s’adjoint donc la complicité de Stéphane Roy, Mauricio Bejarano, Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil et Robert Normandeau.

La basilique fantôme nous entraîne en un lieu qui n’existe pas — ou plus? — et dans lequel la guitare s’essaie à devenir un orgue. Ou tout au moins à le recréer. Des esprits chaotiques, des cordes enfouies dans la réverbération sacrée, des voix désincarnées viennent hanter ce lieu, viennent psalmodier leurs dernières et interminables prières.

D’or et de lumière: l’auteur nous parle d’une vallée aux arbres impénétrables, d’un lac d’émeraude, d’un homme nu au milieu. Et la guitare nous en apporte le côté dramatique et éperdu. On sent une fuite vers un inconnu. On découvre la perte de soi et l’impossibilité de résister à l’environnement. Les sonorités stridentes alentours renforcent ce sentiment. Les forces du destin et celles dites divines entrent en jeu.

Sol y sombra… l’espace des spectres: forme de corrida sonore. Duel entre instrument acoustique et bandes magnétiques. La chaleur des combats hispaniques imprègne tout le morceau. La lutte est féroce. La poussière, magnétique, acoustique, vole sans répit. On sent un combat dans une arène immense, infinie. Vidée de ses spectateurs, où le temps n’a plus de valeur. Où l’affrontement n’aura de cesse que lorsque l’univers s’effondrera.

Soledad: La solitude. Incarnée par un instrument. Où l’on ressent chaque instant, chaque pulsation de soi. Où l’on se découvre par petits bouts. De plus en plus petits. De plus en plus présents. De façon infinie. La guitare est constamment arrêtée dans ses épanchements. Non pas mutilée mais maîtrisée et isolée de tout. Elle se met à s’exprimer, mais reste seule pour s’écouter. Elle n’existe pas sans les mains. L’environnement sonore l’empêche de vivre. L’étouffe. La fait taire par plus de bruit qu’elle ne peut en faire. Il lui faut alors apprendre à exister différemment de sa façon naturelle d’expression. Un jeu hors des limites des accords et de l’harmonie. Un jeu en osmose avec le reste du monde.

L’envers du temps: On pourrait penser qu’il suffit d’entrer à reculons dans le temps pour en voir l’envers mais c’est compter sans sa force d’inertie qui nous entraîne avec lui. Les forces s’affrontent, frictionnent, se heurtent. On voudrait les contrer mais on s’y bute. On tourne en rond. On revient au même point de départ encore. Et chaque fois le choc est plus violent. Et puis soudain on entre, on est de l’autre côté. Le temps n’a plus la même saveur. Il change les lois. Il change notre vision du monde. Il nous ouvre à des références jusque là inconnues. La guitare et les sons se heurtent ainsi sans cesse. Dansent ensemble. Avancent et reculent à l’unissons. Ou bien s’affrontent. Ou s’opposent et s’inversent. Le morceau se finit comme le temps a du commencer: instantanément.

Un album à découvrir longuement.

This is a CD of musical compositions for acoustic guitar and magnetic tape. In 1997 Parra commissioned four electroacoustic performers to create compositions for him. These artists are Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau and Stéphane Roy. Parra took these compositions as a basis for a mixed work by adding his own acoustic guitar parts. These make for international collaboration between the four Canadian artists and the Colombian Parra. A fifth piece is done along the same principles between Parra and a fellow-Colombian composer Mauricio Bejarano. In a style similar to Michael Hedges, Parra performs unexpected acoustic acrobatics on a normal (unprepared) instrument and adds some vocalizations. His additions never overcrowd the work. (4.5/5)

Arturo Parra (1958), born in Colombia, has been living in Canada since 1989. For the last ten years he has been busy composing and performing contemporary pieces, often with the guitar in different contexts. He is interested in sonic exploration, as well as development of new playing techniques and the stretching of the possibilities for the guitar in modern art music. Parra has also been active in the spoken word idiom.

This CD has an interesting background. It all stems from Arturo Parra’s idea back in 1997 to commission works for electroacoustics from several well-known composers. They were Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau and Stéphane Roy; all very successful in their fields. The commission was for pure electroacoustic works, which Parra then would use to compose other works for guitar and electroacoustics. In 1998 both versions of each of the then four works were heard in concert in Canada. Another peculiarity of this project was that the financing was a shared commitment by The Canada Council for the Arts and The Colombian Ministry of Culture.

This CD contains the final mixed results, i.e. the versions that Arturo Parra achieved with the compositions delivered by the four composers mentioned above plus an extra entry managed in the same way, electroacoustically composed by Colombian composer Mauricio Bejarano.

The guitar parts were played by Arturo Parra without the use of any manipulative means, recorded in realtime on an instrument built by Manuel Contreras in Madrid, Spain in 1984.

La basilique fantôme (The Phantom Basilica) begins the selection. Its electroacoustic part is composed by Stéphane Roy. The atmosphere here is that of a remembrance of the souls that have prayed in the basilica, and one has the feeling of centuries of shadowy figures out of the past coming to life once more. A dark breath of air comes at you at the very beginning, but the guitar fingers swiftly along a gallant figure, which gets rhythmic and even very melodious, tenderly touching upon a simple melody, however darkly mirrored and shadowed in the electroacoustics. The rustling movements of long skirts or gowns in an electroacoustic string section sounds like the silent voices of a sea of people, swaying back and forth in time, receding back in the ages and emerging out of the darkness of death; a pale, shy battalion of ghastly shapes, conjured up out of their beyond by intruding visitors. The fabric of this cumbersome piece is dark, with a somber hue, almost not visible in the dusky corners of the basilica, and soon everything will pass, the forlorn shapes unable to retain the energy that keeps them visible or semi-visible for this short duration.

D’or et de lumière (Gold and Light) is composed – its electroacoustic layer – by Mauricio Bejarano. The vision of the composer was a dense forest with a lake, into which a man dives, offering himself up to the God or perhaps the gods. Around the lake – still in the composer’s vision – thousands of bodies (he say “bodies”, not “people”) are lost in a trance dance. The music is grainy at first, fragments of audio shimmering like grains of sand in the sun and between teeth. It strikes me that this project as such is a strange bird at empreintes DIGITALes. The mixed form – especially with the tightly curbed prerequisites of this set — is very hard to do something very good with, as it oftentimes comes out superficial or forced. This release is not totally free of this malice, but I do declare that the result is unusually successful anyway, with this little remark in mind. The electroacoustics of track 2 are delicate, minuscule, tempting, and the guitar remains much a lone elf in this gleaming electroacoustic environment. I wouldn’t mind hearing a developed version of the electroacoustic of this piece by itself.

Sol y sombra… L’espace des spectres (Sun and Shadow… Ghosts Over the Ring), was composed in its acousmatic part by Seigneur Francis Dhomont. In this composition Parra has had the bullring in mind, having the guitar and the tape part confront each other like the matador and the bull. Parra even mentions Manuel de Falla in his introductory text. Without a doubt, this entry is the most exciting so far on the CD, with a richness of sounding material, more equal with the guitar than in the former pieces, in a web of ingenious sounds in which the guitar just adds a peculiar glance, a certain flair, from the so-called real, analog, realtime (explain that word to Einstein!), daily life. This hint at everyday strife is however delivered by Dhomont in a dreamy, mirrored kind of way, and he even uses, figuratively speaking, brass mirrors of The Old Testament, which do not deliver sharp-edged reflections, but hazy approximations of life, and the string theorists of today would say that this is more to the point, since nothing, no matter, no energy, is absolutely certain, but rather a little elusive, floating, evasive… no matter how practical and empiric we believe that we are… These almost twelve minutes of Dhomont-Parra turns out to be a masterpiece, and with Francis Dhomont involved – a man with only masterworks in his catalog – this is no surprise… but it makes me happy anyway, as I was just losing some hope for the mixed form.

Soledad (Solitude) is Gilles Gobeil’s go at this project. Parra says that he aimed the guitar at the expressions of solitude, separating each of the guitar sounds from each other, stripping the instrument of its harmonic properties. A slow atmosphere, a murmur deep down, a long sigh, followed by yet another sigh, spaced far apart, opens a transparency, an openness beneath bridges, at zero-points, in areas with lots of cargo in harbors when no one is at work, a Sunday afternoon at the docks, occasional ants passing over cracks in the cement, cranes resting with bowed necks along the wharf. This is another masterpiece, slightly contoured around a thin-aired space with lots of empty time, lots of un-sounding sounds, a wide gesture over vast areas, water trickling like in a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky; Stalker… and we’re in the Zone, treading it in rubber boots and gas masks, just to make sure… These eerie illusions are skillfully instigated by Gilles Gobeil, and Arturo Parra has followed suite and managed a perfect match. Nothing here feels “mixed”. This is a coherent audio poem in subdued, withheld post-war shreds of darkness, flying up like silent ravens around are hopes…

L’envers du temps (The Other Side of Time) closes the album. Robert Normandeau is the electroacoustician. Parra’s text on the piece takes us into the timelessness beyond time, into a state of mind which is, in fact, in my view, much more true than the daily, frantic dealings with time, because in a universal aspect everything is happening simultaneously, or rather without the hindrance of linear time. Everything that has happened is in the same state, in the same place, as is everything that has not yet happened – and try to define a NOW! Impossible. It’s just a theoretical interface of past and future. Alas, like I like to say: All times are now; all places are here! The initial sounds are like fenders rubbing against the quay-edge as a gentle swell rolls in, from died-down storms far below the horizon. I also get the feeling of crickets measuring time in a hypnotic beating of very short durations, so short and close that they turn into a pitch, a cicada pitch of illusionary time, producing gravity as it curves, having us rest like plummets through the space-time continuum. The music is very gentle, the fender sounds of the guitar mingling with pianistic guitar sounds, in a simmering, vibrating atmosphere which grows denser only to thin out, in a breathing motion, myriads of cockroaches and silver-fish welling up out of planetary cracks in the moonlight outside a coastline steelworks on the Baltic Sea… but in this vision the guitar provides a prayer bead of tones to hold on to in a consoling message from benign spirits in the timelessness…

Nominated for “Album of the year — actuelle, contemporary and electroacoustic music,” Parr(A)cousmatique by guitarist and composer Arturo Parra and Parasites by Diane Labrosse and Martin Tétreault.