Quote from: Zeno Marx on December 24, 2013, 08:07:03 PM
Quote from: spiritassembly on December 24, 2013, 06:58:24 PMIancu Dumitrescu & Ana-Maria Avram | Electronic Music
Good to know. I looked at the Discogs page and can't believe how many releases after 2008, which is when I lost track of what he was doing.
Quote from: spiritassembly on December 24, 2013, 06:58:24 PMConcert of the year: François Bayle + Adrian Moore @ Akousma Montreal
I'd love to hear a review of this. Was it an art installation or purely a performance?
Performance is kind of relative, as the music with these sort of people is always prerecorded, basically multitrack playback with real-time multichannel mixing.
Akousma is an annual festival here, sort of the under-publicised, under-attended (not many more than about 50 people for this concert, a third of whom seemed to be involved with the fest, including Luc Ferrari's widow Brunhild who presented some pieces of her late husband's on another evening), more unruly baby brother of the better-known MUTEK and Elektra festivals, but focused entirely on acousmatic music in more or less the academic tradition, though barbarians have been slipping through the gates in recent years (Daniel Menche and Francisco Lopez last year, for example). There's a more detailed history at
http://www.akousma.ca/en/about/ .
The festival is held at Usine C, which is an old factory that has been converted into a high-tech theatre. Perfect venue for this type of sound as the power of the sound system is immense and the reproduction absolutely pristine. This concert was, apart from the first of Bayle's pieces, entirely octophonic. Earlier in the evening there was a presentation of Francis Dhomont's radio documentary and interview with Bayle, which is essential listening and is hopefully circulating online someplace for the interested.
I wasn't previously familiar with Adrian Moore, who is from England and looks like a more mild-mannered Philip Best, but the three pieces he presented were (though very obviously owing a huge debt to GRM in general and Bayle and Parmegiani in particular) really powerful. The usual hyperactive high-end broken up by some astoundingly deep drones and pulses, allowing itself to build up into regular rhythms quite often, and building up into some really intense peaks, the drop-off from which really did induce vertigo a few times.
Bayle did one stereo piece, Les Couleurs de la nuit, which has evolved a bit since it's original version in the early-mid 80's (you can find the 1982 version on CD from Sub Rosa), and a newer octophonic piece I wasn't familiar with, Univers nerveux, dedicated to the memory of Stockhausen. While Les Couleurs is an old favourite and really came to life at rich volume, this second piece just ripped spacetime completely apart and made it abundantly clear that this kind of reproduction is really essential to be able to completely take this music in. So much detail, with an absolutely meticulous attention to the movement of each of hundreds of individual sounds through space and time, such total mastery of the compositional arc.
It's sobering to see the champions of this highly disciplined approach to music and sound gradually dying out (the recent loss of Parmegiani being a case in point... these people aren't getting any younger). But inspiring to see a man in his 80's still pushing forward into new territory, not content to settle into a "style" (this, as far as I am concerned, is the terminal point for any type of music that wants to remain 'living' - as soon as something like that can be pinned on you you're already in danger of becoming a living fossil) and phone it in. In performance Bayle has the same sort of expression of intense, introspective concentration that seems to be common to people who approach what they do with this particular type of rigour and focus. Just at the point of boiling over or exploding but always keeping control, obviously in a mental space far removed from, and seemingly unconscious of, the audience and venue.
