In the notes he supplies to shed light on these two versions of Aparanthesi, Canadian sound alchemist John Oswald enthuses over A, the single pitch used to make the piece, and he talks excitedly of the relevant frequencies measured in Hertz. Yet there’s nothing abstract about this remarkable music. On the contrary it engages with some of the countless potential incarnations of that pitch, from a thunderstorm rumbling across a prairie to Joan Jeanrenaud’s Intensely focused sounding of a cello.

The opening A is a monolithic chord, an Ayers Rock (aka Uluru) of an A. Like that Australian landmark, it then appears to change colour in response to changing light and atmospheric conditions. Oswald’s material undergoes more extensive and fundamental change however. Mass, texture, shape, dynamics alter too as one embodiment morphs into another. A piano tuner at work melts into the weather, a foghorn bellows, rain falls, a mosquito whirrs, sine tones drone, an aviary of birds emerges from a low hum, and miraculously flocks to A. Oswald recalls how, as he morphed the sound of wind instruments, he imagined “the physicality of the instrument transforming, so a conical clarinet would curl into a French horn for instance, and then straighten out into a didgeridoo.”

Aparanthesi could be approached as a philosophical investigation of identity and correspondence, or as a meticulously crafted guide to the intricacies of listening. But those options might be unnecessarily arid. High levels of technical skill and fine judgment are invariably accompanied in Oswald’s music by a clearcut sense of dramatic possibilities, and an awareness of tensions that give form to sonic events and radiate from them to involve his audience in active relationships with evolving structures of sound. Even in a piece that gravitates continually and predictably to a single pitch, strange things happen that spark unexpected images and open up unfamiliar spaces. His generous commentary elucidates but doesn’t even begin to exhaust the fascinating metamorphic drama Oswald has discovered in A.

Åke Parmerud s’est engagé dans la voie des musiques instrumentales et électroacoustiques depuis la fin des années 70. Son travail, reconnu par les professionnels, les critiques et le public est omniprésent dans les arts visuels tels que le multimédia, la vidéo, le cinéma, la danse ou le théâtre. Dans Jeu d’ombres, le musicien suédois nous présente quelques-unes des créations réalisées au cours de ces dernières années, le plus souvent sur commande. Quelles que soient les techniques de création utilisées pou ces différentes pièces, Åke Parmerud est guidé avant tout par le désir d’offrir une musique singulière, inventive et ouvrant des espaces à des introspections futures. Entre souvenance, réécriture et mouvance vers des ailleurs à explorer les pièces s’ouvrent à nous: libre alors à chacun d’y puiser la force et l’élan qui le guideront vers un plaisir d’écoute épuré et originel.

Front is rich, dense, multi-directional, and very challenging. But is it good? Honestly, this reviewer doesn’t know. Even after a handful of listens, its code remains unbroken, its meaning evasive, its structure oblique, its intentions obscure. A collaboration between Max Haiven (Nova Scotia, Canada) and Jon Vaughn (Saskatchewan, Canada), two conceptual electronica artists, Front is a continuous 73-minute collage work indexed in 33 arbitrary tracks. A sound art buffet, it includes harsh electronics, ambient textures, electroacoustic manipulations, sampling, fragments of guitar tunes, advertisements, pop attempts, and who knows what else. An LP skipping maniacally can lead to a lengthy episode of organ chords or a comical keyboard interlude or a fast-paced collage of harsh fragments. You never know what will come up next — but the problem is, at some point during these 73 minutes, you stop caring or trying to guess what could come up next. The flow of the piece is overwhelming. Its chaotic unfolding obviously hides a deeper structure — it is not gratuitous, you can feel it, it has to be following its own logic — but this structure is very well hidden. You don’t come out of Front with the impression of having wasted over an hour of your time, but you do get the feeling that you missed on something. And this impression only becomes stronger with every listen. This reviewer found himself questioning every shift, every turn, and being unable to find a single convincing answer. So if Front doesn’t provide an enjoyable listen, it sure provides a stimulating one.

[…]»Télépathie«reprösentiert einen der spannendsten Aspekte zeitgenössischer Tonkunst, nömlich den der elektronischen Liveimprovisation. Und was Diane Labrosse (Sampler) und A_dontigny (Computer) hier bieten, ist eine der dichtesten und fesselndsten Aufnahmen seit langem. Angesiedelt irgendwo zwischen Ambient, Noise und Glitch, manovrieren die beiden durch einen hochgradig beklemmenden Klangraum, der die perfekte Untermalung für ein Zusammentreffen zwischen Freddy Krueger und Mad Max bieten würde. Aber nur, wenn beide inzwischen promoviert haben.

[…] Earlier this year, I singled out Wobbly’s Wild Why (Tigerbeat6), a plunderphonic sound collage of hip-hop recordings pinched from the radio, as essential for anyone interested in avant electronics. One of Wobbly’s forebears, plunderphonic progenitor John Oswald, has an intriguing must-hear new release, Aparanthesi (empreintes DIGITALes), which blends delicate sine tones, field recordings, and subtle prepared piano textures. An eloquently quiet disc, savor Aparanthesi on a lonely moonless night.[…]

Ad Reinhardt used to claim that his all black canvases were the last paintings anyone could make. By the same serious/playful reasoning, you could say that John Oswald’s 65-minute Aparanthesi marks the end of the line for recorded composition, because it contains only one note.

But what exactly is one note? Apart from pure sine tones, every sound we hear is a messy conglomerate of vibrations that determine not only the fundamental pitch but also the density and flavour of the sound. They are the reason a mosquito sounds different from a violin, though a recording of either can be tuned electronically to one pitch, or subtly altered until the bug seems to be morphing into the fiddle. Apply that kind of manœuvre over a range of 10 octaves, and throw open the studio door to any and all sounds that can be recorded, and you begin to understand why it took Oswald three years to edit his one-note composition down to two versions of roughly half an hour each.

Aparanthesi is a profound and surprisingly dramatic work. Its open octaves claim a kind of cosmic scale, though many of the constituent sounds are minute, or deliberately camouflaged by other sounds. Each transition remains tethered to the core pitch, which in time takes on the grounding quality of a monotone chant. Even before a group of monks made a cameo appearance in aparanthesi B, the piece has enacted the unity of motion and stillness, and hearing it can be a mystical experience.

The two versions cleave to two slightly different pitches: 440 kHz (the A used by orchestras and piano tuners) for aparanthesi A, and 480 kHz (the undertone emitted by electrical equipment) for aparanthesi B. The second version, originally developed for a live performance, is the more theatrical, and the more revealing about its source materials. Both exploit the ear’s tendency to preserve a fuzzy zone of acceptability around a given pitch. The relationship between “in tune” and “out of tune” fascinates Oswald, who has made several tuning pieces for live and recorded sounds, and whose music celebrates perfection and deviance with equal fervour.

Aparanthesi is ultimately about paying attention, to sounds and their qualities, and to the mysterious interrelation of unity and difference. It’s the practical realization of a metaphor coined years ago by R Murray Schafer: the tuning of the world.

More information about Aparanthesi can be found at www.electrocd.com.