#peter tracy

Since 2017, the record label Aspen Edities has been harboring a group of (mostly) Belgians who don’t seem to put much stake in “genre”. On the one hand, the label’s most recent release, a surging, nearly abrasive, exploration of speaker-vibrated drumheads by the Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach. On the other, the lukewarm, jazz-infused pseudo-folk of the label’s Op. 1, mono no aware (to which…

Finally seeing the light of day this summer is a recording over two thousand years in the making. Recorded over the course of three days as part of the 2018 Tuned City festival in Μεσσήνη, Greece, BMB con.’s Μεσσήνη (Μαυρομμάτι) is a documentation of a series of performances, a record of the duo’s engagement with a specific place: the ancient city of Μεσσήνη (Messene). The city’s ruined…

Improvising is fun. Or at least, many career musicians eventually grow to prefer the relative freedom that improvisation allows, the focus on sound rather than technique and on creativity rather than the execution of a predetermined pattern. Classical musicians are particularly susceptible to this shift in perspective: after years of preparing the rigorous presentations of historical music that…

“What is the function of music?”, asks the Canadian sound artist and composer Tim Hecker in a recent New York Times profile. “Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code? Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?” Here we have one of the defining artists of the Ambient genre, a man who can easily be…

Sitting somewhere at the crossroads between researcher, activist, scholar, composer, and recording engineer, Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis seems preoccupied with sound as both a natural and artificial phenomenon. While it would be easy to categorize Samartzis’ previous electroacoustic collaborations (H, One+One) as sitting on the “artificial” side of this divide, his turns towards…

In certain circles, Élaine Radique needs no introduction. Among the first generation of composers to experiment with electroacoustic music, Radigue began her musical education in the mid-fifties alongside the legendary Pierre Schaeffer, becoming one of the few women involved in the emergence of musique concrète. After early experiments with tape and feedback in the late sixties, she found what…

I stumbled across Tujiko Noriko’s recent project, Crépuscule I & II, completely by chance. Thanks to an excited tweet from a fellow critic (usually a good sign), “Fossil Words” jumped out at me from the swirling vortex of social media, and it turned out to be one of those rare things that can stop a scroller in their tracks: a slow, winding, and beautiful exploration of hushed vocal melodies, the…

Tachycardie ~ Autonomie Minérale

Metal and wood, sin waves and synthesizers, drum heads and patch cables: Autonomie Minérale, the newest record from Tachycardie, is about bringing “percussion and electronic composition together on the same level.” According to the man behind the project, the French composer and artist Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, the idea was “to build percussive pieces in which the acoustic elements function like an…