electrocd

Review

Grant Chu Covell, La Folia, 1 septembre 2007

Glorious concrète asserts itself on Copeland’s newest eD disc, where animal noises, trains and other semi-recognizable sources color the mysteries. Copeland tends towards the industrial, as in Faith-Annihia’s attempt to “create a sonic equivalent to the experimental film notion of ‘flicker,’” whose ambience and collaged trains suggest Schaeffer’s first etudes. They’re Trying to Save Themselves and Streams of Whispers work with recorded speech, the latter an extended rhapsody on its title’s syllables, the former a less successful exploration of an eyewitness account of the 9/11 attacks. The Wrong Mistakes subverts the composer’s routine methods, attempting to legitimize choices he would ordinarily reject. On Schedule manipulates locomotive noises according to 27 preset transformations derived from the route between London’s Waterloo and Moscow’s Belorusski stations. Early Signals commemorates radio pioneers Marconi and Eckersly, and On a Strange Road unites car travel with a metaphysical journey. In Always Becoming Somebody Else, a jungle exploration stumbles across another planet. These pieces enthrall with their fine details, and as ever, empreintes DIGITALes issues gorgeous productions.