electrocd

Review

Frans de Waard, Vital, no. 329, June 20, 2002

‘The Maker’s Humour’ is the translation of the title, and in this case the maker is Yves Beaupré. Not just the maker of this CD, but he’s also a professional builder of harpsichords, spinets and virginals. In the mid eighties Yves set up a small electronic studio, partly to do research for his instrument building, but also to create music. By using sounds from the instruments he builts, plus most likely from the process of building these, Yves crafts together six fine electroaoustic pieces. From this side of the musical spectrum we usually get all of these thumbling sounds which fall over each other, but Yves Beaupré treats his sounds in a rather fresh way. By looping, filtering and pitch changing, he builts very interesting collages of sound in the finest electroaoustic tradition, that will probably appeal also to pieces blend into each other and form one large work, rather then six smaller parts.

From New Zealand hails John Young, who studied composition with Denis Smalley and worked in the UK for a while. He uses acousmatic sounds, ie environmental sounds and processes them. Unlike Beaupré he stays more in the classical sense of processing, even when at times the unprocessed field recordings shine through it. There scratches, wind blowing in microphones, rain falling on roofs and high peeps of metal scraped on glass. In general they are nice pieces, but at times a bit too long and a more accurate mix could have been possible and things would have hold their tension much better.