Achieving the unthinkable by upping the incredible high bar established by their archival box sets from Nicole Lachartre, Robert Fesler, Fernand Vandenbogaerde, and Octavian Nemescu, Metaphon returns with their latest excavation of the neglected shadows of electroacoustic music’s history, with Liliane Donskoy’s ‘Intégrale Acousmatique’, gathering an X3LPs worth of material recorded at Ghent’s seminal Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM) between the 1970s and 1980s. The first ever collection dedicated to the French composer, these never before released works upturn the apple cart with their astounding approach to structure and sonic materiality, standing high among the label’s most important and creatively striking releases to date.

For nearly two decades, since its founding in 2008, Metaphon - the Brussels based imprint run by Timo Van Luijk, Greg Jacobs and Marc Wroblewski - has continuously illuminated fascinating trajectories within a number of historically neglected contexts of electronic music and sound art, producing an incredibly important catalog of releases that endeavour to respect and support radically forward thinking music and those who make it. In recent years, we’ve witnessed Metaphon delve into increasingly more ambitious ground, following the creative trajectories of artists like Jacques Bekaert; Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta, and Takehisa Kosugi; Johannes Fritsch; and Jan Bruyndonckx, before raising their own bar with a series of beautifully produced vinyl box set editions, including Nicole Lachartre’s ‘Mundus’, Robert Fesler’s ‘μP RPF78’, Fernand Vandenbogaerde’s ‘Les Années’, and Octavian Nemescu’s ‘Passages’, digging deep into the neglected shadows of electroacoustic music’s history.

Metaphon is in the midst of a fascinating run that has rewritten their own modus operandi, as well as what we’ve come to expect from them. For many years, the label was primarily focused on work produced by Belgian artists, but increasingly their archival efforts, illuminating little known recordings by neglected electroacoustic composers, have cast their vision further afield. While the majority of its contents were recorded in Belgium, this expanded purview rumbles beneath the appearance of ‘Intégrale Acousmatique’, the first ever collection to gather the work of the French composer Liliane Donskoy.

Born in France in 1933, Donskoy began classical studies on piano with Yves Nat at the age of thirteen, shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War. During her 20s, she then radically expanded her efforts, pursuing advanced studies with Darius Milhaud, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, and Guy Reibel, as well as participating in courses led by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, and Iannis Xenakis. Yet, like so many women of her generation, despite her remarkable pedigree and connections with many of the most notable figures in 20th Century music, Donskoy’s efforts were met with very little support, effectively limiting her ability to realize her singular creative vision. Thankfully, the tides turned in 1977, when she was offered the ability to work in the facilities of the Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM) in Ghent. Over the coming years, stretching into the 1980s, she worked in those studios, producing the near entirety of her electroacoustic and acousmatic compositions. Yet, despite the strikingly unique and remarkable sonic worlds that they weave, this towering body of work has remained unreleased and almost entirely inaccessible until now.

‘Intégrale Acousmatique’ gathers eleven works created by Donskoy at IPEM during the 1970s and 80s across its six vinyl sides. As Metaphon deftly states, the composer’s work is: “characterized by a high degree of structural complexity, precision, and expressive intensity.. [reflecting] a pronounced and distinctive artistic temperament, manifested through a rigorous exploration of sound material and form.” Even from the first soundings of the collection’s opening track, the 17 minute ‘La Légende des Merveilles du Monde’, it becomes rapidly apparent that Donskoy is in a league of her own and is fiercely uncompromising in her approach to sonic materiality, shifting between microscopic detail and forceful placement of textural and tonal interplay. While a strong sense of abstraction and electronically focused practice weaves its way across the collection, spinning bristling and immersive sonic environments filled with endless surprise and challenge, some of the most striking compositions featured within ‘Intégrale Acousmatique’ establish a startling link between the acoustic and electronic realms, particularly notable in the cases of ‘Instant d'Automne’ and ‘Six Pièces pour Violon et Bande’, where she actively intervenes with ensemble recordings which retain a clear sense of instrumentation and arrangement, shattering their autonomy and integrity in beautifully unnerving ways.

Once heard in both its discrete moments and as a totality, ‘Intégrale Acousmatique’ makes it hard to regard the injustice of the neglect that has surrounded the work of Liliane Donskoy since its pieces were first laid to tape during the 1970s and 80s. It’s a truly astounding body of work, marked by singular vision and rigor, that rewrites history as it's largely been known.