A breath of fresh air over electroacoustic and acousmatic scene wafts from renowned Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes, which recently released the very first album by young English sound-artist Manuella Blackburn, whose remarkable curriculum isn’t frankly the one you could expect from a newcomer: she completed her musical studies at the University of Manchester with a Master’s Degree in Electroacoustic Composition with composer and director of Manchester Theatre in Sound (MANTIS) David Berezan and a Philosophiae Doctor with Ricardo Climent, her music has been performed all over the world (Brazil, Canada, Italy, Cuba, France, Germany, USA, Canada, Sweden, Portugal, Costa Rica, Japan, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and so on) at concerts, conferences, gallery exhibitions and festivals and won many international awards and prizes such as Grand Prize in the Digital Art Awards in Fujisawa, Japan, in 2007, two first prizes at Concurso Internacional de Composição Electroacústica Música Viva in Lisbon (Portugal) and many more.
The feature which makes Manuella’s sonic emissions so interesting is the bizarre blitzes of tonal music in the midst of electroacoustic lumps, particularly in the first two tracks of this album, Vista Points, built on different interactions between electric guitar sounds and processed material, and Switched on, which sounds focused on chimes, laminar flows, switches and mechanical devices, where bubbles of tonal music seem to emerge from the depths of deep ponds. Another distinguishing feature of her sonic organisational set-up is the alternation of moments of intense activity and breaks or temporary inactivity, so that it seems that dynamics follows an inner respiratory drive as if each sonic entity is somewhat alive. In addition to the above-mentioned recordings, this feature is clear in the following ones: the engaging automaton of “Japanese” sounds in Karita oto, the amazing flatware and kitchenware powered Kitchen Alchemy, the following Cajón!, which combines the timbre of the Cajón, a Peruvian percussion instrument, “palmas” claps (a clapping technique of flamenco) and other percussive material and the spellbinding gargles of microsounds and onsets of Spectral Spaces.
