Electronic / Musique Concrète

Twenty-four clips of exactly three minutes by 25 composers, from Åke Parmerud and Natasha Barrett to Roger Doyle and Katharine Norman, most built from the same three given sounds, released in 1998 for the 50th anniversary of musique concrète.

For the 30th birthday of INA, the GRM has decided to present in this CD box some of his archives. INA - GRM (Institut National de l'Audiovisuel - Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, France, is the pioneering organisation of electroacoustics, acousmatics and musique concrète, with a history going back many decades, as active today as ever, recording and releasing a long string of historically important, but also new and innovative, electracoustic works, while also engaging in research into …

A landmark document of Swedish electroacoustic composition from the late 1980s, 5 Composers inaugurated Fylkingen Records' ambitious series devoted to showcasing the fertile creative milieu surrounding Stockholm's legendary EMS (Elektronmusikstudion). Released in collaboration with the Swedish section of ICEM (International Confederation for Electroacoustic Music), this compilation captures a pivotal moment when Swedish electronic music was achieving international recognition while maintaining i…

Electroacoustical music from the Inventionen Festivals 2005 and 2006. Composers/tracklist: Edgar Barroso 'ODD'; Mario Verandi 'Comme un jeu des images'; Paul Wilson 'Through the Rain'; Ricardo Climent 'Wallwoodpeckers'; Vladimir Djambazov 'The Secret Life of a Snare Drum'; Ludger Brümmer 'Glasharfe.' Most composers work with field recordings or acoustc object phenomena and process these sounds with digital software means. The brilliant piece from E. Barroso uses only the "noise"-components of in…

York University's music department houses one of the UK's first-ever electronic music studios, and during the early '70s, it was a hotbed of creative activity. Much of the released output from the studio at this time revolved around the work of the dynamic composer Trevor Wishart. Journey Into Space was his first release, composed between 1970 and 1972, and was privately-pressed (shortly before the formation of YES records), as two separate LPs in 1973. (The CD cover amalgamates the two or…

A subtle, moody, rich and wide-ranging work, in which atmosphere, emotion and dramaturgy lead the ear far beyond music into a world of hints, evocations, anticipation and association and, in passing, reveal a complex metonymic language that, at a deep level, invokes that mostly unconscious lexicon of sound we have all absorbed collectively and subliminally in the course of a century of movie-going, television viewing, documentary recording and electroacoustic experimentation. Once sounds have be…

Three acousmatic triptychs by Stéphane Roy from 1998 to 2003, marking five years in St Louis and the return home: Montréal street recordings with du Bellay and Baudelaire, a homage to Pierre Schaeffer for musique concrète’s 50th, and a circus piece.

Four works by Stéphane Roy from 1987 to 1994 that move from expressive early tape pieces to Mimetismo, where Arturo Parra's guitar blends into the tape, and Crystal Music, composed largely at CCRMA in Stanford.

Realized at and commissioned by Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). Premiered April 25, 2004, salle Olivier Messiaen, Maison de la Radio (Paris, France). Comes within 108-page book with original texts in French translated in English including interview/discussion between Alexandre Yterce, Florence Gonot & Jacques Lejeune; also including is a full list of works by the composer.  The Cahiers Sonopsys will question some composers of this Musique Concrète / Acousmatique which, since 1948, the year…

Nine works by the Havana-born composer Sergio Barroso from 1982 to 1995, most for microtonal Yamaha FM synthesizers he plays himself, with oboe, violin, viola and bassoon soloists and echoes of charanga, flamenco and Cuban street music.

Three electro-acoustic works by Rolf Enström: Directions (1979), the Prix Italia winning radio piece Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise, a shaman’s journey drawn from Sami culture, and Slutförbannelser after poems by Elsa Grave.

Régis Renouard Larivière was born on 3 December 1959 in Paris. He decided to devote himself to acousmatic composition following the Adac-GRM training course he attended at the end of 1984 with Jacques Lejeune and Philippe Mion. He has been teaching since 1990. He is currently professor of composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Mons (Arts2) in Belgium. He has written numerous articles on various electroacoustic composers (Parmegiani, Bayle, Schaeffer...), as well as on Schaefferian concepts. H…

Six works by the Toronto composer Randall Smith from 1995 to 1999, three for tape alone and three mixed pieces for cello, accordion, double bass and alto flute, remastered by Ernest Cholakis.

Musique concrete realized 1999/2000 in Chicago and Mainz. Released in a 6-panel digisleeve.

This book, accompanied by 285 tracks on 3 CDs of examples is a unique and indispensable resource work for all those interested in electroacoustic music. Examples by Parmegiani, Henry, Bayle, Xenakis, Luc Ferrari etc. illustrate Pierre Schaeffer's text. This was originally designed to accompany Schaeffer's seminal work Traite des Objets Musicaux, but is a wonderful and enlightening tutorial in its own right.Le Solfège de l’Objet Sonore (Music Theory of the Sound Object.), a sound recording that a…

Patrick Ascione's acousmatic triptych of 1984 to 1989, commissioned by the Ina-GRM: three long multi-part pieces built on his idea of tape as a canvas for sound, with a preface by Michel Chion.

Five acousmatic works by Ned Bouhalassa from 1990 to 1998 tracing his move from cinema for the ear towards techno, from Jets, written for San Francisco’s Sound Traffic Control, to the self-portrait Constamment and the Russolo prizewinner Attraction.

Novum organum... commissioned by INA-GRM & composed in 1993. Liber Duodecim Portarum commissioned by INA-GRM & composed in 1983. La Nuit d'Hermès commissioned by Radio France. Italia prize 1981.

Michel Chion’s second empreintes DIGITALes album pairs two musique concrète works eighteen years apart: Le prisonnier du son (1972), his first melodrama, and the Vingt-quatre préludes à la vie (1989-90), which answer it.

Eight works by Monty Adkins from 1994 to 2005, 93 minutes at 96 kHz, from a train journey after Turner and a Hubble-inspired piece made of rocks and gas cylinders to drum 'n' bass, William Gibson and a flute piece for Alejandro Escuer. DVD-Audio.

Five short electroacoustic works by Mario Rodrigue from 1985 to 1993, three of them made with analog tape techniques at the Université de Montréal and reworked for this disc, including the CBC Grand Prize winner Tilt.

A 1976-2002 retrospective of Marcelle Deschênes: music for Georges Dyens' holographic installations, the multimedia show Lux, two pieces from the unfinished cycle Griffes and the Bourges-winning Moll for winds, percussion and toys. DVD-Audio.

Seventh volume in the Acousmatrix series. "In 1955, Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna founded a Studio di Fonologia at a Milan radio station; it was the first electronic music studio in Italy. Berio became very active there, organizing concerts and also publishing a new music journal, both under the name Incontri Musicali. Berio explored the frontiers of sound, particularly vocal sound, thanks to his association with Cathy Berberian. She was willing and able to produce a remarkable variety of exte…

2001 release ** "For his first CD, Laurent Grappe has created a fascinating electro-acoustic tale. Le Luxe de la Réflexion! (The Luxury of Reflection!) blurs distinctions between field recording and acousmatics, urban and rural, French and Arab. At the center of the work is Isabelle Bassil, a Lebanese woman splitting her time between France and Lebanon. Her life experience, bridging two cultures, provides the main thread. Her interventions are spoken in Arab and other protagonists speak French, …

Five stereo acousmatic works by Jonty Harrison from 1978 to 1995, from the analogue Pair / Impair to the GRM commission Hot Air built on party balloons, with the eleven-movement French suite … et ainsi de suite… made from wine glasses.

This is volume 2 of Omega Point's Obscure Tape Music of Japan series. Hitomi-Za is an experimental puppet theater group that still exists today in Japan. This recorded performance took place from February 13-17th in 1962 at Sogetsu Kaikan Hall. The program consisted of three parts, and Joji Yuasa, Kuniharu Akiyama and Naozumi Yamamoto composed background sound for each part. This CD consists of two works made from magnetic tape from among the performances. This is the world premiere release of b…

Six fixed-medium works by Jacques Tremblay from 1990 to 1995, built from concrete sounds and quotations: Gregorian chant turning to distortion, a night of love in six movements, a jazz tribute and a sound reading of Proust’s Combray.

2004 release ** Card sleeve. "Finally the overdue and long awaited re-release of Iovae’s Quatervois which came originally as a limited CD-R release on Drone Disco. Iovae, native of Cincinnati is a true alchemist, working out lo-fi tape collages and simple four track assemblages. He uses unusual sound sources and layers these into rather dense and industrial etudes of found sound. Iovae (Ron Orovitz) has been playing with sound in the culturally insular confines of Cincinnati Ohio since circa 198…

Paysages Planétaires on Alga Marghen may be the great unrecognized masterpiece of ethno-electroacoustic music, a 3CD box that arrived in 2004 with almost no fanfare and has waited two decades for ears ready to hear it. Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, collaborators across forty years and more than twenty works, here achieve something that resonates uncannily with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's "Fourth World" concept. Yet Pousseur, the serialist pioneer who worked alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and…

Four acousmatic works by Gilles Gobeil from 1995 to 2001, cinema for the ear drawn from literature and travel: Proust’s Swann’s Way read by Marc Béland, H.G. Wells’s time machine, Jules Verne’s underworld and sounds from a trip to Italy.

Four acousmatic works by Francis Dhomont from 1986 to 1991, the second part of his Mouvances~Métaphores cycle, including the Bourges Magisterium winner Chiaroscuro and Signé Dionysos, a lakeshore opera in which every role is sung by frogs.

Francis Dhomont's acousmatic triptych on wandering, composed in Montréal and Marseille between 1981 and 1989: Points de fuite, the nine-movement … mourir un peu, which quotes Schaeffer and Henry, and the spatial Espace / Escape.

Francis Dhomont's four-part homage to Pierre Schaeffer and fifty years of musique concrète (1989-98), built from the first movement of the Étude aux objets, with Machaut, Pierre Henry's door and a list of “inventors of the treasure” along the way.

2005 release ** "Edgar Olivier Charles doesn’t exist, it’s the alter-ego of Roger Tellier-Craig, who works as Et Sans, Le Fly Pan Am and Set Fire to Flames. So far so good. ‘Rediscovered music recorded in Montreal between september 2002 and january 2005, it says on the cover and rediscovered are three tracks. In each subtitle, to each track, a name is mentioned: Iannis, Karlheinz and John – so, I’d say Xenakis, Stockhausen and Cage (well, more likely than, say Adams? Lennon?). And maybe Edgar Ol…

Five works by Denis Smalley from 1976 to 1992, including Wind Chimes, Valley Flow and the Golden Nica-winning Clarinet Threads with Roger Heaton, plus Piano Nets with Philip Mead, all remastered by the composer for this 2004 edition.

In an allusion to Michel Chion’s ‘Dix études de musique concrète’, this collection of acousmatic moments represents a meditative opportunity for Denis Dufour. Sorting through his repertoire, it aims to seek out and identify characteristics and easily recognizable expressive habits whose clarity brings them close to the art of melody in an approach borne of entomological specimen classification and playful staging at the same time. Neither text nor theatrical contexts. Twelve short pieces; melodi…

In Bocalises, Denis Dufour explored with virtuosity the sound possibilities of a sole sound source, glass jars broken, crushed and mixed to themselves to infinity. Fifteen years later, he takes up the material and, with digital tools, presents a retouched and recoloured version to give a new power and poetic richness to the initial energy.

"double lp reprint of the famous david behrman wave train compact disc issued a couple of years ago. experimental music from 1959-68: 'canons' featuring david tudor on piano and christoph caskel on percussion; 'ricecar' a prepared piece performed by david behrman in the early 1960s; 'wave train' a powerful feedback piece performed live with gordon mumma; 'players with circuits' a combination of live electronics and amplified acoustic sound; 'sounds for a film by bob watts' for outdoor environmen…

Comes with 16 page booklet. Daphne Oram is best-known for the design of her Oramics system, and also for co-founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, but until the release of this material, the only easily-available piece of music by her on CD was the 8-minute long "Four Aspects." There was also a 7" EP from 1962 on HMV, released as part of the Listen, Move and Dance series that was specifically designed to help children dance. Although the short pieces on this record are very basic, it cou…

In Daniel Teruggi's own words: Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously bel…