Iancu Dumitrescu

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

The companion volume to the Harryphonie / Movemur Et Sumus LP (Electrecord ST-CS 0190), and together with it the most complete document of Iancu Dumitrescu's early period to emerge from Romania. Where that record concentrated on the harryphono and on sustained string writing, this one opens Dumitrescu's range considerably, presenting four works that traverse the different dimensions of his hyper-spectral language.

Alternances (1967) is among his earliest mature works - a string piece that already displays the phenomenological approach to sound that would define his entire career: intervals approached not as harmonic intervals but as vibrational events, each bow-stroke releasing overtone clouds that interfere with each other in real time. Bas-Reliefs extends this logic to a larger instrumental palette, the title suggesting a sculptural relief - sound as relief against silence, figure against ground. Apogeum (1972), for 22 wind instruments and three percussion groups, is the most architecturally ambitious work here: a massive orchestral confrontation in which the overtone fields generated by the winds mass and collide at unpredictable angles. Reliefs returns to chamber scale, the word now heard differently - a layering, a stratification, harmonic material built up in strata rather than developed linearly.

These four works span a decade of Dumitrescu's early development, and their availability on a single LP pressed by the Romanian state label - the only official outlet at the time - remains a remarkable fact of cultural history. The institutional apparatus that constrained almost everything else somehow permitted this. Original Electrecord pressing.