Aberdeen, Scotland is the base of composer Pete Stollery, who in this DVD-Audio shows great skill and a well evident “human touch” which distinguishes his music from the many acousmatic artifacts that, in their complexity, disguise a lack of ideas amidst bell-and-whistle techniques. These seven tracks plunge the listener in a system of sonic interdependency where events happen in spurts and consecutive evolutions, mainly through timbral interactions that cause natural environments and peculiar phenomena to morph into something that is completely unrecognizable. Stollery generates composites of modified informations, displacing our aural perspective by exchanging roles and rules, adjusting the genetics of the primary sources through an almost debilitating work of aggregation and disintegration. What is missing — and this must be intended as a compliment — is the brutality that often characterizes the most cerebral electroacoustic patchworks: no sudden explosions, no theatrics, no screaming. We are allowed to enjoy a trip through agitation without losing control, unexpected twists and contradicting alterations all parts of a mechanism that uses the analysis of the matter as a compositional basis. To summarize it all, we’re not in presence of an overstressing kind of music, rather led into vast areas of thought that always have room for intelligent stimulation and satisfying colour. Being this my first meeting with Stollery’s sound, I can’t help but praise his outlook on the difficult art of acousmatics, a cauldron which too often causes loss of personality. Not in this case. Un son peut en cacher un autre is definitely a keeper.
