#violostries

The title track was his first major work. In 1963, the violinist Devy Erlih commissioned Parmegiani to make some music to accompany a dance performance; it took him over a year to realize the taped elements of the 16:39 minute-long piece. All of his contributions were sourced from violin sounds, which he sped up, slowed down, filtered, diced and stitched together into an alien accompanist to Erlih’s virtuoso fiddling, whose dramatic plucks and bowed slashes inhabit a realm of high flickers, low expulsions and warped re-shapings of the violin’s familiar sounds. At the time, it represented a challenge to listeners to give up their preconceived notions of any instrument’s limitations; over a half century later, it remains an amazingly detailed sequence of sound events.  

Two shorter pieces occupy the other side. “Capture Éphémère” (“Ephemeral Capture”) is an early effort to deal with the spatial aspect of listening experience. Originally composed in 1967, its mainly unrecognizable sounds loudly rocket, quietly crinkle and shudder like a cartoon character being smacked in the face by a giant tape leader. One suspects that to hear it in its original state would be somewhat like sitting in the middle of an airfield, hearing planes roar past and overhead, and then hearing those sounds be masticated by some monstrous insect. But since quadrophonic sound never really took off at a popular level, in 1988 Parmegiani remixed it for stereo, and that’s the mix heard here. “La Roue Ferris” (“The Ferris Wheel”) debuted in 1971 at a festival celebrating the shipyard of Menton, a port town on France’s Mediterranean coast. One wonders what the fest’s attendants made of its constantly morphing swarms and whirls, which sound more electronic in origin than the other two pieces included here. But once more, the music holds up quite well across the decades as an expression of motion and density through sound.