Luciano Berio / Bruno Maderna - Electronic Works (1992 compilation of pieces created 1958-62)

Great collection of early electronic/ electroacoustic/ tape music by Luciano Berio (1925-2003) and Bruno Maderna (1920-1973), in the years following their joint founding of the Studio Di Fonologia Musicale Di Radio Milano.  After WDR Köln and GRM Paris, this was intended as a third resource in Europe for producing new music with innovative electronics and tape manipulation.

Over an hour of engrossing sounds on this BV Haast CD effectively gives us a short album's worth from each composer, starting with Berio and the jittering sounds of Momenti (1960).  The avant-garde classical singer Cathy Berberian (who was married to Berio at the time) is heavily featured on the rest of the material, with cut-up fragments of James Joyce (1958) and then in a lengthy exploration of more primal vocal sounds on Visage (1961).

From Maderna we get two sixteen-minute pieces, starting with Le Rire (1962).  It's a great immersion in electronic sound and fragments of laughter and chatter that might be my pick of the disc.  Lastly, Invenzione Su Una Voce aka Dimenzione II (1960) features Cathy Berberian performing vocal phonemes prepared by the German poet Hans G Helm.  All incredible stuff to listen to, especially if you liked previous Luigi Nono posts.

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pw: sgtg

Berio/Maderna at SGTG:

The New Music, Vol. 2 (scroll past big list)

Berio at SGTG:

Coro

Sequenza IXb

Arsenije Jovanović / Ivana Stefanović ‎- Concerto Grosso Balcanico / Lacrimosa (1993)

Shared release between two Serbian composers, who have previously been posted here in their own right - Jovanović with an untitled collection, and Stefanović with Inner Landscape. According to the liner notes, both were asked in the Spring of 1993 to produce a piece for Austrian radio, as they "were among the most renowned radio artists in Europe."  What they brought with them were immediate and raw first-hand experiences of Yugoslavia's turbulent last days; as Jovanović noted, "There is an inevitable link to the war still being waged as I write this."

Jovanović's 16-minute Concerto Grosso Balcanico sets out a peaceful, rural scene at first, with bells, birds and sheep, but very quickly introduces tenser elements of an ominous clatter and then an electronic layer that comes on like a distant helicopter.  Barking dogs introduce a rhythmic element as some sped-up tapes enter, and the piece becomes progressively more ominous until the unmistakable sound of gunfire dominates the final minutes.

Gunshots are also the first sound used in Stefanović's 25-minute Lacrimosa, which then unfolds as a much more musical piece, albeit heavily collaged.  Samples of Requiem music from Pergolesi, Mozart, Penderecki and Britten are mixed with documentary tapes from the streets of Sarajevo in May 1992.  As Stefanović remembered: "They were all together for the last time: Serbs, Muslims and Croats."  After a final social gathering, with a poignant exchange of Shaloms, the piece ends on a plaintive acapella song.  Both these pieces are deeply affecting in their material and background story, are superbly recorded and arranged, and will definitely stay with you after listening.  Highly recommended.

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pw :sgtg

Claude Schryer - Autour (1997)

 More environmental/radiophonic sound composition to kick off this week, courtesy of Claude Schryer, born 1959 in Québec.  Four of his works covering 1995-97 are featured on this collection, but rather than being lengthy tracks like when I've previously posted this sort of thing, Schryer works in short snippets averaging two minutes (excepting the 11-minute closing piece).  The result is more like a gallery of photographs in sound than an immersive film, but no less evocative for that.

First up is Musique De L'Odysée Sonore, which did actually start life as the soundtrack to a National Film Board of Canada documentary about Québec City, before Schryer revised and condensed it into 11 minutes.  For me, the most striking of the seven sections here is Église, which encapsulates Schryer's talent for weaving together his sound sources (a grandfather clock, a boat horn, a Popol Vuh-esque choral improv, a Native American chant and garbled spoken poetry) into something truly ear-bending.

Switching continents next, Schryer uses recordings from Mexico City and Oaxaca state for El Medio Ambiente Acustico de México, itself cut down from a 50-minute radiophonic work Marche Sonore II.  Ocean sounds and fields give way to inner-city subway sounds, trains, trucks and marching bands in a parade, and another ambient trip back into nature - all of it evoking its sense of place beautifully.  After that, there's a trip back in place and in time with Vancouver Soundscape Revisited, where the source sounds were recorded in the early 70s for the World Soundscape Project.  Schryer describes his method as selecting a few hundred samples from the project by sonic spectrum, pitch, function and context, and again deftly combines them all into a stunning work.

Closing the disc is the standalone piece Autour d'Une Musique Portuaire, where the harbour sounds, bells and trains originally used for a live radio broadcast (with Schryer directing the 'performers' on the boats, trains and cathedral bells to play together by walkie-talkie!) were re-purposed in the studio for a saxophonist, trombonist and clarinetist (Schryer) to improvise over.  The result makes the most of the wide open spaces and long boat-horn drones to let the instruments fill in the gaps perfectly.

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Arsenije Jovanović - s/t (1994 compi of works 1977-1993)

Four remarkable and engrossing works from Serbian radiophonic composer (and theatre, radio and television director, and author/professor) Arsenije Jovanović, b. 1932.  We're in similar sonic and conceptual territory here to Ivana Stefanović, who I posted last year - they even shared an album once, which I'll need to track down.

For today, we join Jovanović on a few of his many travels, first of all in a cave in an old abandoned Serbian village.  Invasions (1978) is certainly an apt primer for what an accomplished sound recordist and mixer Jovanović is - goes without saying this a headphones turned up the max album - as the sounds for voice, percussion and a wind instrument bounce around the eerie space.  We stay underground for Resava Cave (1977), where the percussive sounds apparently include the stalagmites and stalagtites in Jovanović's search for the natural, timeless acoustic.  He also wanted the vocal performers to sound as primally liberated as possible, the unsettling results suggesting that million-year-old spirits have been summoned.

Back on the earth's surface, Jovanović hears some very strange seagulls on an uninhabited island, and learns that elderly donkeys were once abandoned there, the birds over time mimicking their forlorn cries.  His liner note then veers off into an unrelated donkey encounter, and doesn't clarify whether or not the sound sources for Island Of The Dying Donkeys (1988) feature authentic field recordings and/or recreations - most of the voices sound suspiciously human.  Either way, the 20-minute piece is so head-spinningly bizarre that it simply has to be heard to be believed.

Finally, Jovanović returns home, and reflects on some of the many odd objects and strange sounds that he's collected over the years. (This is as much as I could figure out from the description, the French record label's liner note translator having apparently given up at this point.)  Ma Maison (1993) certainly sounds like an extended inventory of interesting sounds, from voice, percussion, wind instruments and all kinds of environmental recordings.  As with everything on this collection, the end result just sounds phenomenal, which is probably the main reason I keep going back to it repeatedly.  Highly recommended.

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Ivana Stefanović - Inner Landscape (1996 compi of works 1979-1992)

Handy three-work intro to Serbian composer Ivana Stefanović (b. 1948 in Belgrade), who studied at IRCAM in Paris before starting work at Radio Belgrade, where she founded a Sound Workshop in 1985.  She's frequently described as a primarily radiophonic composer (the CD booklet uses the phrase multiple times), so we'll go for that as the category for this fascinating album.

First up is Interpretation Of A Dream (1983/4) for solo flute, tape and female speaking voices.  Starting out with pure flute tones, the piece quickly goes a bit Maggi Payne with the effects, before introducing urgent whispered voices a la Homotopy-era NWW - the more percussive noises of the flute and other odd, echoing sounds also have a bit of Stapletonian feel.  The voices in this unsettling dream recount fragments of The Poet's Prayer by Vesna Krmpotić and Rosa Luxemburg's Letters From Prison.  The second work, Whither With A Bird In The Palm (1979/80), for percussion and tape, has a similarly dark atmosphere, sometimes recalling the Bartok Adagio made famous by Stanley Kubrick (in The Shining) and others.  The great range of percussive sounds is bit like a tape-manipulated reduction of that Yoshihiro Kanno album I posted a little while ago.

The most epic work is saved for last - 32 minutes of Metropolis Of Silence/Ancient Ras (1991/2), described as a radiophonic sound poem.  According to the sleevenotes, "This composition was taped in the recording studio after a year of field research of live sound fossils etched into the remnants of the medieval Serbian town of Ras and its surroundings."  After opening with sounds of nature, the sonic landscape comes to life with the voices of the Renaissance Ensemble, who performed vocal and musical improvisations in the open spaces of the town remnants and the Sopoćani and Crna Reka monasteries.  Fascinating stuff to listen to on headphones, with the extended length letting the concept really take effect, before it all ends by a flowing river.

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