I first heard Darren Copeland’s music on the Storm of Drones a 3CD released by Asphodel in 1995 — he contributed two excellent tracks, which captured his unique sound. (The first of these three CDs was dedicated to pieces previously released on empreintes DIGITALes, and exposed this label and its music to a wider audience.) The pieces on this new release, another in the series of ‘CDs of short duration for half the price’ by empreintes DIGITALes, are of a similar ilk. (empreintes DIGITALes, if you’ve just tuned in, [is] one of my favourite labels, and consistently release amazing music. By now, it could probably be considered the foremost label of electroacoustic discoveries.)

Copeland works exclusively with recordings of environmental sounds, and is a true sound-ecologist (along with, amongst others, Hildegard Westerkamp—one of my heroes—listen to [her] full-length CD Transformations on this same label). Back to Darren: Rendu visible contains 3 tracks composed between 1993 and 1996. All of them consist of carefully blended, sometimes heavily processed environmental sounds. However the original sources remain quite recognisable—all part of Copeland’s intention to stimulate visual imagination.

Most of us have been to a beach and listened to the sea, but where in the head are the shores we hear in his music? The gulls are confined in a huge reverberant shell, the human voices swirl as if spinning on a silent merry-go-round.

The terrain shifts and shakes continually like a slow, jittery film shot through the shuddering heatwaves rising off a hot road, which weaves through a strange land. Twisted, asthmatic animals loom large, then recede, only appearing to quicken the pulse. Space creases the speakers and buffets the room. Doors open and reveal long corridors where lights flicker staccato and suggest weird, familiar forms—dream apparitions trailing luminous gossamer veils.