electrocd

Review

Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, 1 septembre 2007

Adrian Moore, born in 1969, is an acousmatic composer from Nottingham who studied among others with Jonty Harrison and collaborated with Birmingham’s BEAST collective. His music values the role of the tape medium in a live performance very highly, and his interest in the diffusion of sound explains the variegated pigmentation of the tracks presented in this CD quite well. Like it often happens with this kind of music, whose level of unpredictability is directly proportional to the multi-shade tonalities utilized by the creators, a host of influences and sources is at the basis of a continuous mutation of atmospheres and climates. The title track, named after a poem by Emily Dickinson, mostly uses woodwind instruments but sounds rather like a meeting of modular serendipities on the edge between blinding light and mind-warping speed. Power Tools was influenced by the noise of sources such as lawn mowers, hedge trimmers and steel factories, the piece akin to a congregation of percussive polyphonies camouflaged under a sensitive juxtaposition of studio manipulations. Piano Piece (for Peter) features Peter Hill in a piano-cum-tape half-romantic, half-atonal elucubration influenced in equal measure by Smalley and Scriabin. The six-movement suite Sea of singularity, lasting almost 32 minutes, closes the album with the most fascinating choices of colours, masterfully seaming environmental recordings from various European locations in which human presence is clearly audible, with otherworldly examinations of abstruse codes and expressive sonic entities, culminating in a fabulous implant of bleating sheep and lapping Venetian gondolas during the aptly titled Third mint sauce (or sheep appoggiatura). Here, like throughout the rest of the disc, Moore reveals himself to be a talented aural painter, his fantasies showing all the positive signs of a luminous future in the electroacoustic community.

… the most fascinating choices of colours, masterfully seaming environmental recordings from various European locations…