Radiolaria is a superb suite of Buchla synth music composed and played by Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, Parisian-born now living in Montréal. It began life as improvisations performed on the Buchla 200 — a 1970s model which probably induces frissons of excitement among vintage-synth buffs — when she was able to get her hands on its knobs and cables in Sweden. She used these recordings as “raw material” for the composition here, which has ended up as a very coherent compelling suite in eight parts. While sequestered in Sweden, she also clobbered the EMS night watchman with a cosh so she could break into a locked cabinet and start tinkering with an analogue spring reverb unit (frisson #2, see above). But no equipment fetishist she, rather the plan here is to create a plausible and sympathetic sound portrait of plankton and other microscopic forms of marine life. About time too — they’ve been neglected in experimental music for far too long, although Thomas Tilly has come close with his detailed field recordings of water-bound insects. Ana Dall’Ara-Majek has evidently made some close studies of plankton if her well-informed liner notes are any indication, and each track is also the springboard for further avenues of exploration and thought — ideas about the environment, life-cycles, industrialisation… fascinating observations about movements in the water and preparing for a mighty wave, the sound of weird clicks under the ocean, the way that diatoms are so numerous that they colour the entire ocean and can be seen from outer space… phenomenal insights, and an excellent set of music, composed and realised with consummate care and skill, and distilled into a concise package of information.
