A Belgian electroacoustic composer, rooted in more conventional forms (she was trained as a pianist) with quite a career behind her and, excepting a couple of tracks on various artists collections, here debuting with her first solo electroacoustic album. The four lengthy works presented here all feature use of sounds that have been totally mutated beyond their source recordings, being layered, twisted, multi-layered and/or folded over themselves, along with some recognisable sounds occasionally showing through — some traffic, breathy vocal expressions, aquatic, metallic, environmental and subterranean type sonics as well. Elements of Luc Ferrari and Michel Redolfi come to mind, yet it’s clearly a different and original mind at work here.

Yet another new name to me, and the first of three female artists on empreintes DIGITALes featured here. Ana’s a Montréal, Canada, based composer, and this would seem to be her second album, after the 2018 release Nano-Cosmos which I haven’t heard as yet.

Featuring eight tracks in its 62 minutes, Radiolaria ranges from a 1-minute piece of electronic gabble through to three much bigger works in the region of 11 to 14 minutes, and four more of a moderate length. The release starts with the startling sonic scatters of Mare Buchlae, which is quite possibly what the title implies, water sounds processed through the credited Buchla 200 synthesizer. That method of working seems to be the basis of much of the music here that mixes acoustics and electronics, some of it composed, some of it improvised. In all, it makes for quite different empreintes DIGITALes release.

Nel 1941 il padre di John Young fu annoiato nell’esercito neozelandese come artigliere e poco tempo dopo partecipò alle battaglie di EI Alamein e Monte Cessino. In Once He Was a Gunner è la sua voce a raccontare gli eventi che lo videro protagonista durante la guerra, sino al momento in cui conobbe la propria futura moglie in Italia nell’inverno del 1944, quando molte unità delle forze alleate alloggiavano nelle case dei civili. In Histoires de soldats la sua testimonianza si affianca a quella di John Ewings, fuciliere dell’esercito britannico che nell’agosto del 1914 ebbe la visione di un angelo su un campo di battaglia in Francia durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale, la cui vicenda narrata nel 1980 in un programma radiofonico della BBC costituisce l’asse portante di An Angel at Mons. Storie crude e poetiche al contempo, orchestrate can un equilibrato bilanciamento fra suono sintetizzato e flusso verbale che rende l’intero lavoro una creatura ibrida fra radiodramma, composizione elettroacustica e spoken word. [7.3] L’album Espaces lointains ha invece struttura più tradizionale, spaziando fra una molteplicità di soluzioni che attingano indistintamente da scenari naturali come da ambientazioni urbane. Sweet Anticipation apre il tutto con un insieme di field recardings raccolte a New York in cui i suoni della città si mescolano e si stracana creando un affresco vivace e dinamico. In Arioso, l’ambientazione si sposta nella notte umida di Tappan Square a Oberlin nell’Ohio, can un coro di grilli e il bip elettronico dei segnali di attraversamento pedonale a creare un’atmosfera meditativa che dette la quiete notturna. Hidden Spaces è invece suddiviso in tre sezioni, ciascuna delle quali esplora uno scenario distinto spaziando dal lago Ràfstad in Svezia alle sonorità stridenti di una scala mobile nella stazione della metropolitana di Outremont a Montréal, sino al un parco animali di Altschluderbach costruito attorno al rifugio in cui Gustav Mahler creava le sue composizioni. Paesaggi sonori evocativi, ricchi di inventiva e fascino.

Con una preparazione da pianista classica alle spalle, Ingrid Drese ha sviluppato un interesse crescente per la musica elettroacustica sul finire degli anni novanta, quando ha iniziato a frequentare i corsi di composizione al conservatorio di Bruxelles. Questo suo lavoro Lointain intérieur si basa su un intreccio di visioni poetiche e ricerche scientifiche, spaziando dalle allucinazioni dello scrittore, poeta e pittore belga Henri Michaux in Pérégrinations d’une petite sphère happée par le temps all’affresco uditivo suddiviso in cinque sezioni Treize virgule huit, concepito per otto altoparlanti e basato sulla trasposizione delle onde elettromagnetiche in onde acustiche; dalla poesia di Rainer Maria Rilke che in Au-delà des Mille Rayons diviene sinonimo di rotazione e circolarità, al finale di Cri de Merlin ispirato all’opera di Carl Gustav Jung. Un’esperienza percettiva complessa, sviluppata attraverso un articolata fusione di suoni e significati.

Ben Goldscheider’s solo horn took centre stage in a rewarding and fascinating concert featuring new and older compositions that combined his instrument with live electronics

We’ve come a long way from the early days of electroacoustic music, when a ring-modulated piano or a flute or a violin dialoguing with electronic echoes of itself was often the height of technological sophistication. Even so, it still seems strange to find a solo horn as the focus of a concert featuring real-time electronics. But Ben Goldscheider spent his time during lockdown in 2020 looking into the possibilities of combining his instrument with live electronics, and he presented the results of his research in a recital with the “media artist” Philip Dawson, which featured the premieres of three specially commissioned works.

Goldscheider also included the work that had started him on his explorations, the 1979 Fantasie for Horns II by the German-born Canadian Hildegard Westerkamp, in which the solo horn has a taped accompaniment assembled from the sounds of many different horns, including fog, car and alp. The writing for the live instrument is entirely conventional, the tape background mostly continuum-like, until shortly before the end the horn embarks on a solo that seems to come straight out of a 19th-century German opera. Thea Musgrave’s Golden Echo III was Goldscheider’s multi-channel recreation of a piece originally composed in the 1980s for solo horn and 16 other horns on tape, which places the audience at the centre of a surround-sound celebration of brass sonorities.

None of the new works could match that kind of sonic luxury, although Alex Groves’s Single Form (Dawn), which he describes as a “slow-motion, sonic sunrise,”,built up an impressively dense texture from the instrument’s harmonics. Zoë Martlew’s Nibiru places the soloist at the centre of a global apocalypse – the title comes from Babylonian mythology – with the horn pleading for humanity’s salvation, amid sounds drawn from a variety of cultures, and ending with the song of an extinct Hawaiian bird. And in Mark Simpson’s Darkness Moves II, inspired by the work of the artist-poet Henri Michaux and his experiments with mescaline, Goldscheider’s extraordinary virtuosity and the potential of the real-time electronics were fully exploited, and there was a true dialogue between the two. Simpson’s vivid, surreal musical gestures and their interactions with their digital transformations were spectacularly vivid, so that the piece acquired a theatrical dimension that was totally compelling.

Le 14 juin 2024, le grade de docteur en beaux-arts, honoris causa, a été conféré à Hildegard Westerkamp par la Simon Fraser University (SFU) en Colombie-Britannique (Canada).

«Les compositions d’Hildegard Westerkamp ont été jouées et diffusées dans de nombreuses parties du monde. La majorité de sa production compositionnelle traite des aspects de l’environnement acoustique: paysages sonores urbains, ruraux ou sauvages, voix d’enfants, d’hommes et de femmes, bruit ou silence, musique et sons des médias, ou encore sons de différentes cultures, etc.»