Picking up where their 2020 release, Echos +, left off, Room40 returns with Canto+, another astounding body of work issued in a limited edition on vinyl from the Argentinean born electroacoustic pioneer Beatriz Ferreyra. Spanning nearly 40 years of material across 5 works, it reaches the heights of artistry, all the while laced with the composer’s well known wry humor, the likes of which only a true master can achieve. Absolutely incredible and easily among our favorite releases to so far emerge from Ferreyra, it's a truly essential entry from one of the most important composers working today.

At 84, it has taken Beatriz Ferreyra a lifetime to slowly reach the place of recognition that she has rightfully deserved since the beginning of her career; one of the most talented electroacoustic composers of her generation whose astounding body of work was cast into the shadows of her male peers. A member of Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) since the early 1960s, it has only been during the last 10 years, through numerous releases of contemporary and archival works, that broader audiences have been able to glean a true sense for the immersible power of her work. Central to this innovative has been the Australian imprint Room40, whose 2020 release, Echos +, gathered 3 stunning compositions spanning as many decades, across its two sides. Now they return with Canto+, which collects 5 works, spanning almost 40 years, and pays homage to her focus on dynamism, rhythm, voice and the potential of concrète materials. Absolutely incredible and creatively brilliant from start to finish, it's yet another crucial piece in a puzzle that’s far from complete.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1937, Beatriz Ferreyra began her career as a pianist, leading her to migrate, in 1962, to France in order to study with the legendary conductor and pianist Nadia Boulanger. Shortly after her arrival, she became entranced by the country’s pioneering concrète and electronic music scene and expanded her focus to studies under Edgardo Canton, Earle Brown and György Ligeti, before becoming, in 1963, a research assistant to Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, where she began to create a series of innovative multi-channel tape works, as well as embark upon numerous collaborations with Henri Chiarucci and Guy Reibel.

For an artist who has remained at the center of it all for more than half a century, until the appearance of a CD survey by the small electroacoustic imprint, Mnémosyne, in 1998, Ferreyra’s output in recorded form was tragically underrepresented. Only two works had appeared on compilations during the 1970s, one within Philips’ legendary Prospective 21e Siècle series, and another issued by Fylkingen. Despite the astounding works featured on the Mnémosyne release, it would take another 17 years for the stars to align, first with appearance of the LP, GRM Works, via Recollection GRM in 2015, then with a remarkable series of releases via trAce, Room40, and Persistence Of Sound that have continued to bring her rare talent to centre stage.

Room40’s latest LP dedicated to Ferreyra’s output, Canto+, hones in upon the composer’s unique deployment of dynamism, rhythm, and voice within the field of musique concrète, with two of its five works bearing a dedication to close friends; Jingle Bayle’s (to François Bayle) and Au revoir l’Ami (to Bernard Baschet).

With the album’s opener, Canto del loco (Mad Man’s Song), a window opens into what makes Ferreyra such a singular and unique voice in the field of electroacoustic music. Creatively rigorous and enthralling, the piece’s 12 1/2 minutes of buzzing and warbling expanses of interwoven ambiences, textures, and tonalities are unmistakably laced with the composer’s remarkable sense of humor, balancing the heights of artistic practice against an acute consciousness of the absurd, and setting the tone for the album’s remaining 4 works which rattle and dance across the last side and a half - transforming and manipulating her source material to the point of non-recognition - while displaying a sense of structural interplay that is only possible from a true master’s hand.