One of the latest releases on empreintes DIGITALes comes once again from a professor working in Great Britain. This times, Adrian Moore from Sheffield presents us five electroacoustic pieces, each one lasting between 10 and 14 minutes and recorded between 1994 and 1997.
Considering the academic nature of this work, Traces is something to be listened to very carefully and also a creation that will be understood more by music students than by anyone else. However, I’d say that these fice tracks are rather easy to enjoy, very melodic and fast evolving. Playing with noises and material from atypical sources (Study in Ink is for example done only with sounds from a pen being used on a plastic board), Adrian Moore has managed to create rhythmic and tonal patterns that can appeal to people into noise or experimental music.
Junky or Foil-Counterfoil, with their seemingly chaotic structures, evoke a very complex and yet coherent ensemble of short tunes and broken rhythms. The whole thing is very subtle, very calm, but is everything but boring. In a way, you can imagine that this is Merzbow on valium and without distortion: an avalanche of small samples that sound unstructured at first and slowly reveal its entire form.
I don’t know if I was able to understand fully the ins and outs of this CD, but Traces is to me a pleasant recording, that don’t forget to be nice to the ear even though it stays very abstract and complicated. A nice surprise overall.