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Composer Åke Parmerud is from Göteborg, which is also the home of underground labels such as Fang Bomb, Release The Bats, and Beläten, names on which we can always rely to provide solid blasts of depressive post-industrial noise and drone music. Parmerud isn’t exactly cut from the same cloth, being as how he’s a prize-winning and classically-trained electroacoustic maestro, but there are moments of tasty darkness on his Growl (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 15132) collection which appeal to a macabre chap like myself. La vie mécanique, for instance, is a pretty effective critique of modern industrialisation, or at least an observation on it, and takes the hoary old dystopian cliché of “modern man becoming machine-like” and dusts it down for an update that involves samples of machinery blended with Techno music. In this lively composition of clattering beats and metal, it’s far from clear where the factory machines leave off and the dancefloor begins; it’s intending to convey something about the body being broken down into smaller units, much like the cogs of a machine being taken apart. Parmerud also makes a commentary on the contemporary use of machines (laptops, presumably) for making music. I wish he’d be a little less equivocal about it, both in his notes and his music, but it’s a nifty statement.

Maybe serious composers shouldn’t dabble with Techno. However, if you think men of Parmerud’s generation should leave the kids’ music alone, you’ll be even more appalled by the idea of Growl itself, where he drily observes “metal music is big in Sweden” from his lofty position, and borrows some ideas from his youngest son who plays in a metal band. This might be Aron Parmerud who plays his “axe” for Marionette, a Death Metal band who made a couple of albums for Listenable Records. What the composer has done here is zero-in on the throat-shredding vocals that characterise a lot of the music in this genre, and through arranging samples of voices shrieking “Hell Is Us! Die We Must!”, has built a virtual “growlers choir”. With the dark techno backing, electronic effects, and gloomy ambient tones, this works surprisingly well, even if it sounds too “expensive” and well-produced for a genuine metal album and has far too many interesting dynamics. He also misses the claustrophobia and genuine sense of doom. But even so Parmerud turns in a strong piece of work, and in any case he wasn’t setting out to produce a metal album.

What else are the “young people” interested in these days? Vinyl records, of course! So listen in to 2011’s Grooves if you want to hear what Parmerud can do when sampling the black stuff. The source material for this was the vinyl collection of his friend Kai Hanekken; in fact the composition seems to have been a by-product of a digitisation project requested by said Hanekken, who urged the composer to pick up the gauntlet and create a composition. He gave in. What gets sampled are run-out grooves and vinyl “noise”, i.e. crackles and clicks and such; Parmerud seems to have been only too aware that doing this was already something of a well-worn cliché, but again he liked the challenge and wanted to see if he could invert it and bring new life into the idea. Although best heard at high volumes and played back through a multi-channel system, Grooves still succeeds on your home CD player and delivers a suffocating density which is clearly one of this composer’s trademarks. Continuity is severely disrupted by the multiple edits, and the speed with which the layers of abstract noise pile up is incredibly alarming. You’ll feel like you’re trapped on an enormous spinning black disc of death.

Also here: 2014’s Electric Birds derived from birdsong samples (yet another instance where Parmerud had promised himself he would never make a piece like this), and Transmissions II, the most recent composition. It derives from a multi-media work where, if seen live, a singing choir are able to manipulate sound signals in real time. Some fascinating complex electronic layers result, and it sounds a lot more contemporary than some of the formal music that often gets released on this label, and is every bit as convincing as any given Mego release from the last few years. Sometimes proper composers make a ninny of themselves when they try and get “with it”, but Åke Parmerud has nothing to be ashamed of here.

Three long pieces of electroacoustic composition from German composer Hans Tutschku on his Firmament (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 15131) collection received here 8th July 2015. As with many of the musicians on this label, he’s got a conservatoire / academic background, with highlights of his career including a three-year tour with Stockhausen (mainly to study the master’s ideas about sound projection) and earning his doctorate under Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham.

2010’s Firmament — Schlaflos is like an abstract painting with its strong contrasts of highs and lows, quiet and noisy passages; and it has that “rushing” effect as of music travelling along a long tunnel at high speed, which I’ve always associated with Parmegiani (I think this is where I first heard it; presumably it’s a matter of layering and vari-speeding). There may be some human voices in the mix, whimpering or bleating in awe of the cosmos. Tutschku manages to transcend his technique and arrives at something more than just a nice blend of drones and textures; it’s something to do with his ambitious theme, which is to describe the “universe of sound” that he believes is constantly playing inside every human being. He sees that as a good thing; we don’t need to be afraid of it, it means that there are no limits to our space.

2011’s Klaviersammlung is a piano piece of course. The composer describes it as “an outrageous sound travel into the world of piano”. Every time he went to the University of Cologne he walked a long corridor filled with decrepit broken pianos, and he imagined (it’s becoming clear what an old-fashioned romantic he is) that they still contained happy memories of the music that was once played on them. This composition is his bid to unleash those memories. The sounds he captured from the actual pianos after he raised their dusty lids was not apparently very “musical”, but it’s the studio assembly and processing that’s the relevant part of the work. Again, it’s large-scale, transformative, intuitive, exciting. Crazy arpeggios, impossible glissando statements; the ghost of Harry Partch walking through clouds in the stratosphere. Conlon Nancarrow was not invited.

2014’s Issho ni is perhaps the strongest work here. We might call it a “sampling” piece, except that word doesn’t begin to do justice to the care, attention and compassion with which Tutschku has diligently curated and assembled his collection of vocal recordings from around the world — songs, prayers, lullabies, folk singing, children’s songs — an ongoing project which he’s been doing since 2009. Using this personal library, he builds what he calls “an illusory celebration”, a vocal pan-cultural ritual in which the listener will slowly become involved as it unfolds. I suppose it’s “illusory” because these people (from varying cultures, histories, countries) have not only never met in real life, but may not even share any common ground, except in the idealised artistic space created by the composer. He’s done something similar in the past for Ailleurs-intérieur, where the recordings were combined with composed phrases and instrumental sounds, to create “utopian” musical works, and with Together which was used for a dance performance in Boston. Issho ni is a profoundly moving listen; without ever overstating his case, nor editorialising (something which Stockhausen could not resist doing on his 1960s epic work Hymnen), Tutschku makes a strong humanist case that transcends faith, ethnicity, and geography; in his mind, he’s clear that the voices “are joining to memorialise unity, and to rejoice.” Given the state of the world in 2016, can any political, economic or military agency say this?

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Muinaiset maya-intiaanit palvoivat Aurinkoa. He tutkivat sitä ja muitakin taivaan ilmiöitä tähtitieteellisesti. Amerikkalainen nykysäveltäjä Elizabeth Anderson on ollut kiinnostunut sekä aurinkotuulista että maya-kulttuurista. Hän yhdisti nämä asiat sävellyksessään Solar Winds, jonka materiaalina ovat radioastronomiset äänitykset aurinkotuulista. Teos valmistui vuonna 2012 ja paria vuotta myöhemmin hän sävelsi teokselle jatkoa. Jatko-osa sai nimekseen … and Beyond, ja sen ajatuksena on kuvata avaruutta Aurinkoa kauempana, jossakin meidän tietämyksemme ja mielikuvituksemme rajoilla. Mitä on meidän mielikuvituksemme tuolla puolen, kysyy Elizabeth Anderson. Millainen maailmankaikkeus siellä on?

Science and strategy define Adrian Moore’s 3D warfare and his inter-/inner-galactic travel, much of which takes place behind the veil of fog or darkness. But far from being cold and calculated, these four pieces elicit the supernatural wonder of good ballet or a sudden plot twist. Like much acousmatic music, his pieces approach sensory phenomena as portals to a unified field, decelerating, filtering or otherwise transforming sounds to alter perception/conception of their natures and our vantage point to one either planetary or atomic in magnitude.

While grand in scope, openers Battle and Counterattack are not as explosive as might be expected, balancing both halves of the word ‘warcraft’ in their demonstrations of the grand choreography of well-co-ordinated armies via masterful manipulation of ‘“scenes”, “feints” and “attacks”’ within multichannel space, resulting in corresponding episodes of subterfuge and sudden ambush. American cinema may have gulled us into believing that victory lies solely in gung ho bravado, but Moore’s bewildering stratagem draws strength from Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, keeping pace kinetic and unreadable.

Spaces outer and inner are examined in Nebula Sequence and Strings and Tropes, the former marked by startling accelerations and serene spells breaking the sense of near-constant motion amid ‘clouds of swirling dust and gas’, all of which arise from such mundane ingredients as rocks and ball bearings. I’m reminded of the peregrinations of the gestalt-mind protagonist of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as it tears through galaxies at the speed of enlightenment, witnessing the births and deaths of civilisations and constellations along the way; by and by coming to recognise the immeasurable intelligence of the stellar bodies. This living universe is just as evident in the dense and magnified vibrations of Strings and Tropes — the last of these majestic works — in which the listener shrinks to the size of an atom to listen to the titular strings as if they had the proportions of a nebula. Thus we encounter the more fascinating properties of a potentially paint-drying instrumental solo.