With the agitated flapping of insect wings and a metallic figure that screws itself tighter, the music kicks in. A wobbling drone encloses the events, as if experienced inside a big earthenware pot in Denis Smalley’s backyard…
Jingling sounds share duration with crumpling static, and a peculiar pulsation is ever-present. You get the feeling of drifting shortwave situations, just through the character of sounds and the way they move in space. I get that old feeling of warm valves and late nights, but then fringe tingles and distant birds – among them, right before the conclusion, one of my favorites; a curlew – finish the piece up in a turn into something else, which never gets to develop, since the work ends right there…

I really like that last line; “some intended by the composer and others perceived by the listener”… That tells it like it is. As the work has left the composer’s studio, it’s own life has begun, or it’s own lives, in case there are more than one listener. You never know what will transpire inside somebody else’s head… like mine, for example…

Well, to begin with, I doubt whether anything at all is transpiring, but then I hear some low-level disturbances far right and left, like a half dead housefly trying to revive itself behind a flower pot, but only managing to propel itself in murky spirals across the oilcloth…
These tiny specks of audio tickle your ear like stray insects or emerging tinnitus, or some other problems of a more hallucinatory kind…

As the sounds get louder, the composition gets more and more intriguing. I come to think about Rune Lindblad and his Attacks I – III from the 1970s, when he caught flies, wasps, bumble bees and so forth in glass jars, recording their flapping wings against the glass with contact microphones. That was very loud right off, though, while this creeps on you like sexual desire or drowsiness… These little curving, piercing sounds soon get a companion sound, which is more modal, with real timbres – not just noise properties. Any color of tone seems bright and startling in this environment of neutrino flybys…

This is really something new and different on this CD; a new thought, a new plan, a new execution of artistic intent. The sounds stay gray and black and piercing in a dull, micro-industrial way, which interests me a lot. These are grains of metal, flakes of soot, cut-up temporal residue lost in the cracks of time… or the stuff that falls of a knife when you sharpen it.

Flocks of colored sounds gather like grains in digital photos at ISO 2300, or like faint memories of colors strewn down your subconscious as you rest in an unidentified place in time, an itch on your nose…

Suddenly very sharp and loud incisions cut right through the insignificance of strewn sounds, getting you on your feet, ready for what’s coming – but then a hardly audible downward glissando stoops on the outskirts of hearing, like a declining celestial body in the evening sky… and later a bow across the sky describes the motion of a jetliner, high up in a milieu of fancy clothing and distant destinations…

Lampros Pigounis has produced some very delicate and almost intimidating audio, which I would like to hear much more of.

I wonder if Martin Stig Andersen is acquainted with my newfound friend, former nun, now electroacoustic composer, Sisse Schilling, whom I met at Stockholm New Music 2005, and who has also worked in Wayne Seagull’s vicinity.

The music hits hard and rolls away like ache between the mountains, reaching down in a murky, behind-the-wall murmur, eventually appearing like a ghost in the room, trembling on a corrugated feeling of metal, charging your physicality in vibrating colors. Andersen leans into the Bayle room, in a faintly glowing atmosphere of fine-tuned associations and delicate nuances of sound, precariously traveling from the soaring, clear, sweeping morning feeling to the covered, hidden, tucked-away grumble of stash-aways, heard through the wall, murky, dark… in a motion into the gravity of the very lowest chakras, where the basic structures lend involuntary atmospheres to the Apollonian regions on high: a clay base of Dionysian possibilities, an infra world of unintentions, of sleep-walking forces; undercurrents of the mind…

The crunchy aspects of Andersen’s audio lure you onto sidetracks of existence, where the tendencies are soaring shamanistically, in a dimmed remembrance of Rolf Enström’s Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise. Some instances bring you into stooping slowdowns and consecutive, steep speedups, flinging you around like a test pilot exposed to fearsome G-forces…

I solemnly enjoy the way Andersen brings you into the mist of notions, into hints of bardos far beyond the logic and reason of this world.

With tense, brief, nervous breaths Ian Stewart begins his piece. I soon realize I’m in more of a soundscape than in any other piece preceding this one on the CDs. I get the ambience of a street, the swinging of a door on its hinges – and then a transportation inside a vehicle of sorts; perhaps just inside the vehicle of the body or the vehicle of time. Ailing sounds whine in the distance, while the breathing is so close it can only come from yourself. This is an egocentric form of anatomic sound art!
However, circling, rasping and jingling, even percussive sounds, move about as the piece takes on other layers of sonic transformations, the breath held or the breather dead… and if so, this could well be a configuration of auditive signs from someone’s transient bardo journey, from unknown circumstances to unknown circumstances, i.e., the usual stuff…

Surprising, beautiful chords ring out in a drone that is pitch-shifted in wondrous relaxations, albeit not without a certain caution, a certain awareness of possible danger…

Small, conversative sound gestures fly up and flutter around like jackdaws; some fragmented breathing is again traceable, and African percussion rhythms extend the possibilities into village deliberations in places with strange-sounding names.

Conversations are heard like in a dream or in a hypnotic state, and I don’t even think they’re actual conversations, but just the sonic outlines of conversations; the patterns of conversations – but no talk, no significant lingual messages delivered; just the pattern of language as abstract art; dancing illusions on the horizon, on the rim of a tin can.

Tambo runs a slingshot round the nearest balloon, very close by the surface (or it may well be the aforementioned tambourine!), in low-level flights of a daredevil of the audios! Ambrose Seddon allows for luxuries of tiny, crusted chocolate cream candies; you know, with a hard crust and some semi-liquid substance within, as the sounds presses forth around bowls and cups of a Christmas drawing room table in the high end parts of Bristol; i.e. Clifton!

Soaring, wheezing timbres – sometimes rough and vibrating, sometimes even and shiny like the surfaces of Christmas tree balls – approach and distance themselves in the company of little tingly notions and embellished bell sounds stretched beyond reach, out of this life and back, smelling of the netherworlds…

The music is atmospheric to the limit of dust and mist, but with a translucent glow that pulsates messages from one dimension to another, from concave to convex, from green to turquoise, from major to minor… and I’m some rust on the inside of copper water pipes, as time rumbles through cityscapes…

Pessel is pretty laconic in his work description. He also has his own attitude, working more in dense techno and break beat realms, after a prying, flexing, introverted beginning, entering occasional trance situations, from which he cuts right back into hectic city frenzies and the too-much-too-soon mood… I can’t say too much about this. Maybe it’s the time of day, or – as Joni Mitchell said – the time of life… It simply about finding the right sort of panic…

Seth Ayyaz’s piece has certain things in common with Lampros Pigounis’ work at track 5, i.e. the meager, prickly, flywingtrembling start; these gray and black crumpling stories left and right, like dirty snow slowly falling in on itself in the sunlight on the sidewalk of some small-town street, without anyone noticing or caring; a state of decay, silently transforming the crystalline framework of a snowdrift into a little stream of water into the gully hole.

The piece carries on under the microscope, minuscule ordeals of matter magnified into the domains of audibility, at times scrutinized, it seems, even through a scanning electron microscope, revealing the inherent atomic jitter – and way inside, in the spacious realms inside the circumference of madly circling electrons: a wonderful veil of shadowy Arabian music; a touch of Om Kalsoum and Farid El Atrache inside the dreamy states at the core of matter…

Well, after listening through these two CDs from City University London my fears are gone; the fears I got after hearing the garbage that was chosen for the emsPrize in Stockholm just a short while ago – because these pieces from the classes of headmasters Denis Smalley and Simon Emmerson are packed with ingenuity, artistry, beauty and excitement. All I can say, with Bob Dylan, is… keep on keeping on!