#electroacoustic composition

Alien Intelligence was conceived during Guffond’s 2021 GRM residency and was composed on GRM’s Serge modular synth alongside Max MSP. The intention was for the technology to have as much of an imprint on the music as the composer herself, calling to mind Roland Kayn’s cybernetic approach to computer music. Indeed, experimental music has long called into question the role of the composer themself, going back to John Cage’s indeterminate music. Alien Intelligence, however, exists in the context of AI increasingly seeping its way into every aspect of art, labor and culture. Thus, there’s a palpable tension in Alien Intelligence, existing somewhere between the bliss of letting go of control and the potential for disruption inherent in all technology.

The three tracks on this album each stand as statements of their own. “Serge & Maxine Variation One” is a slow-moving ambient piece reminiscent of Laurie Spiegel’s “Patchwork.” The track is driven by warm layers of synths but maintains a somewhat surreal pitch that gradually builds into a soft alarm by the end. In contrast, “Serge & Maxine Variation Three” is more overtly dark and desolate, with streams of sound flowing over the drones like sirens. The final track, “Serge and Maxine Variation Two” feels like the natural culmination of the album. The first few minutes are a sparse, simple, almost folk-like melody that give way to more layers of warm synths, calling back to the first track. The track is very pretty, but in an open-ended, fittingly “alien” way. It’s the sound of something mysteriously fading into the distance. The music has all the characteristics of an ambient drone album, but the stasis is consistently interrupted by stops and pauses. Where any other musician would focus on the psychoacoustic elements of the drone, Guffond seems to find just as much purpose in these small disruptions. The end result is a haunting, deeply perplexing record that rewards repeated listening.

Take the title track, a 22 minute-long behemoth that takes up one third of the CD’s running time. It begins with a single note, which sounds, decays and sounds again. Then ghostly resonances respond to that note, quiet and complex, like an accompanist searching for the right chord to support the soloist. As that exchange progresses, a bass presence rises up through the soles of your feet while elongated notes turn into even longer stretches of flutter tonguing. Then silence, followed by a slow-motion shift between isolated multiphonics, subliminal whistles and roughly filtered purrs.  Fast-forward to the midpoint of the piece and there’s a passage where you follow tones into the interior of the clarinet, pads clicking over your head, and then step into a cavern where Eliane Radigue-like pitches execute subdued Doppler maneuvers around the circumference. “Decay of the Angel” acquaints you with a comprehensive catalog of clarinet potentialities, and then insists that that’s not enough.   

Each of the shorter tracks is packed with event. “Spheres of Dissonance” also visits Radigue territory. But where the French composer might unpack some difference tones over a half hour or longer, Cymerman bombards them for six harrowing minutes with a variety of reed-based armaments. High shrieks, alien deflations, and a convincing approximation of a squeaky door hinge assail the minimalist content like a gang of malevolent musique concrète partisans determined to disrupt the concert. Rather than analyze the rest, let’s just stop here and acknowledge that any album that inspires such extravagantly loose and unlikely associations is better than drugs. Decay of the Angel declines to satisfy anyone who wants music to fit into established stylistic or methodological cubbyholes. This is music determined to be what it is that was made the way it needed to be made.

Logic Being the Lowest Form Of Magic is an album-length, download-only release that Chantler developed over a year and a half at electronic music studios in three countries to be played at Audiorama, a 21-speaker listening space in Stockholm. Boiled down to a stereo mix of reed organ drones and fluctuating Serge synthesizer tones, it remains an immersive piece of music, albeit one that depends upon the listener to run it through some decent speakers. The sounds accumulate like tumbleweeds against a fence, building up and bustling around, and the piece’s 36-minute duration gives one plenty of time to notice first the grain of each sound and then the way layers give way to more layers. The listening experience replies to the title’s unanswered question — what forms of magic are higher than logic? They are legion, and among them is the sensate experience of sound as it washes over and through your body, transforming your emotional and physical state and perhaps your spiritual orientation as well. Stray thought — the day we melt our weapons down to build a surround-sound, communal listening space in every town is the day we will know that humanity really can transcend itself. That’d be magic indeed.

A baser but still community-boosting impulse was the genesis for the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. John D. and Adolph B. Spreckels, the heirs of a sugar fortune, built it in the wake of the opening of the Panama Canal as part of a scheme to draw commercial interest to the city of San Diego. At one point its instrument was the biggest outdoor organ in the world, and while the pavilion’s fortunes have waxed and waned over the past century, it’s currently the site of weekly year-round free organ recitals and a special summer series of concerts sponsored by the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department. In 2017, a group of experimental composers wrote pieces for the Spreckels organ; four can be heard on the LP Organ For The Senses (Marginal Frequency), and while it doesn’t include Chantler’s contribution, you can get that from his Bandcamp page. You want immersive? Petition the return engagement and pack your bags for San Diego, where the force of the organ’s 5,017 pipes will turn your belly to jelly. Nothing you can fit into your computer can do that, but this ten-minute piece nicely sketches out the instrument’s potential. Chantler builds up ranks of sound, which part to reveal whorls of overtones and a sub-bass presence so solid you could herniate a disc just listening to it.

Front and Above approaches sound from another angle — instant music production. Chantler’s tenure at Café OTO put him in the room with London’s best improvisers, and this CD documents his first concert with two of them. Between them, saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Steve Noble have played with a formidable who’s who — Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost, Peter Brötzmann, John Butcher, Alan Wilkinson, etc. If you’re hearing him for the first time, Wright sounds like a successor of John Butcher; he’s alert, abrasive, able to change the temperature of a room with a single coarse note. Noble can fill the room with sound if he likes, but his playing is also highly detailed and endlessly variant. It’s handy to have a percussive thesaurus in the band with the third guy’s as likely to trigger a rain of mechanical pecking as he is to displace space with amorphous ghost tones. Sometimes Chantler is like a sound designer, influencing the atmosphere with subliminal presences, but he can respond timbre for timbre and gesture for gesture. This CD imparts an experience of constant unfolding, which makes sense given that it was the trio’s first encounter. Since then it has become an ongoing concern.  

Nicolas Jacquot FR | Composer

Node n°3 - Electroacoustic composition

The piece 'Node n°3' is an electroacoustic composition which makes part of a larger project called 'The Jazzercises'. It is made out of 11 pieces sorted as 2 Odes, 3 Nodes and 6 Modes. Each of these three moods stands for a specific ritual fonction : vocal appeals, concrete interludes and dance matrices. It resynthetizes some concrete sounds that can be found disseminated within the dancing Modes. The global polyrhythmic arrangement is derived from a Conway numeric sequence of the palindrome date 02022020. "As I did already for the composition of the 2 previous Nodes (n°1 & 2), I use a special date to calculate a numeric texture from the John Conway sequence, also called the 'Look & Say' sequence or the 'Audio Active Decay' sequence. Once the sequence is sorted and entirely developped, I assigned durations to resulting numbers while I freely group some periods of the sequence according to specific music material. As an instance, here is the first prints of the sorted numeric comment (the Conway sequence) from the digit date of February 2-2020, up to the magic of the self regenerating sequence : 02022020 => 'Four 0 Four 2' 4042 => 'One 0 One 2 Two 4’ 101224 => 'One 0 Two 1 Two 2 One 4' 10212214 => 'One 0 Three 1 Three 2 One 4' 10313214 => etc… ... => … 1031223314 => 'One 0 Three 1 Two 2 Three 3 One 4' 1031223314 => 'One 0 Three 1 Two 2 Three 3 One 4' 1031223314 => 'One 0 Three 1 Two 2 Three 3 One 4' 1031223314 => ad lib.

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