Todor Todoroff

Univers Parallèles gathers six fixed-medium works by Todor Todoroff, realized between 1991 and 2017 at the ARTeM studio in Brussels. Several were conceived for 4, 8 or 12 channels and are presented here in stereo; two grew out of his long collaboration with the choreographer Michèle Noiret.

Dédales (2008) reworks music written for Les familiers du labyrinthe, Noiret's 2005 choreography for the Paris Opera, setting breath and vocal sounds against the mechanical world of the labyrinth. Solo feu transforms the sound of fire and comes from her piece In Between. Matières (2003), commissioned for a publication on new materials in architecture, returns to the sources of musique concrète: surfaces brushed, struck and rolled on, recorded on analog tape with natural reverberation and no processing beyond speed and direction changes.

Obsession (1991), a quadraphonic study on Eros and Thanatos, joins analyses of water sounds that feed a self-sustaining synthesis system with fragments of poems by Charles Baudelaire; it shared the Public prize at the Noroit-Léonce Petitot competition and was remixed in 2019 from the analog original. In Rupture d'équilibre the composer plays a virtual pendulum, changing its mass, stiffness and damping in real time. Requiem for a City was begun after the Paris attacks of November 2015, while Todoroff was in residency in the city: viola, granulated excerpts of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and Beethoven's Seventh, modular synthesis and the words of victims heard on the news. It is dedicated in part to Mélanie, a young violinist killed in Brussels on March 22, 2016.

Born in Brussels in 1963, Todoroff trained as a telecommunications engineer before taking a First Prize in electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles. He has built gesture-controlled instruments and sensor systems for concerts, dance and installations, and won a First Prize at Bourges in 2007.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 19160, 2019.