Bourges in France is a very important location for the art of electroacoustics. I’m thinking, of course, of the Bourges Competitions, and the celebrated series of CDs from the competitions; Cultures Electroniques, and also the series Chrysopée Électronique. Now the reputation of Bourges as a true center of sound art is even more firmly confirmed, when Monsieur Paul Clouvel single-handedly has created a record company and a sound venture: Elektramusic. The first CD is out, and I’ve just loaded it into my CD player, while I also study the book that Clouvel also has published along these lines, called Elektramusic: electroacoustic and experimental music, issue 01 December 2005. It is bilingual, in French and English, and I do admit I am truly impressed by this singular effort on the part of Paul Clouvel.

Initiatives like his are what we all need in the world of arts. The most valuable results stem from the ambitions of enthusiasts with a cause; guys like Clouvel with a burning desire for the spreading of the Word; in this case the art of electroacoustics.
I hope Clouvel can find the strength and energy – and money, too! – to keep up the good work. I haven’t seen such a raw-energy effort in quite a while in Le Monde Électroacoustique! He’s like a fierce French furnace! I hope he doesn’t self-destruct…

On Elektramusic’s first CD, Paul Clouvel has collected an interesting bunch of sound makers. The first one is Danish composer Martin Stig Andersen. The book that accompanies (?) this CD – or is it a separate issue? – contains – in addition to lots of interesting texts – short bios on the composers on the CD. From the book I learn that Martin Stig Andersen was born in 1973 in Denmark, and that he got a diploma in composition at The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus as late as 2003. The most well known of his teachers was Bent Sørensen, who has written numerous great compositions. I especially enjoy the Birds and Bells CD (ECM New Series 1694), with compositions like The Bells of Vineta, The Lady and the Lark – and, of course: Birds and Bells.
Andersen also – as part of his degree – studied electroacoustic composition at renowned City University of London. He is currently studying with legendary electroacoustician Denis Smalley there. Smalley completely won my electroacoustic devotion with his Wind Chimes many years ago; a part of Wergo’s great series Computer Music Currents, but he has published himself on various labels, for example the finest electroacoustic label of today: Empreintes DIGITALes.

Read more about the man at his site: www.martinstigandersen.dk

His contribution on Elektramusic’s CD is Sleepdriver, composed at City University London and at home in Denmark 2003 – 2004.

Track 1. Martin Stig Andersen: Sleepdriver [08’05’’] (2003 – 2004)
Mastered by Dominque Bassal.

Kicks off with a gray whoosh, spatial as a passing accident, but soon transforming into a dreamscape of forgotten thoughts, impressions and fears you’d lost a long time ago, or yesterday – here confronting you again, having you deal with yourself until you’re done: there’s no way around it, you have to look yourself in the eye in these sounds: sounds that express the universal identity of yourself, in communion WITH everyone else – everything else – and in OPPOSITION with everything: how can you get that to function? You CANNOT! And that is how new ingenuities are shaped: in pain and anguish without mind control!

Sleepdriver moves fast, but in a static way, stands immobile, but in shimmering speed. The contours are sharp and immediately blurred and mistified – even, perhaps, mystified.

The drones that echo, that emerge like distant threats under the horizon and dissipate, are pale recollections of deeds you regret, cruelties to other sentient beings, or pain you caused yourself, by greed and habit. Get OUT of habits; that is one lesson taught in Sleepdriver. Follow the hardest notion, the toughest choice – and enjoy every millimeter of humility as you crawl!

Martin Stig Andersen’s piece isn’t revolutionary or even very original. It follows recipes thrown together in France thirty years ago – but it’s done in an intelligible and consequent way – and I play it LOUD and fantasize!

The second entry is provided by Bérangère Maximin (yes, got to get those apostrophes right!): Tant que les heures passent.
Being the classical gentleman that he surely is, Paul Clouvel omits the age of Miss Maximin, but from her looks she seems to be somewhere in her twenties, not that it matters at all!
She was nonetheless born in Lyon, France, but spent her childhood in the island of Reunion. She went into music and literature, and then took up studies in acousmatic composition with renowned Denis Dufour, who is yet another of my own gurus, with important works like Bocalises (which I included in my first national Swedish radio show in 1988) and Notre besoin de consolation est impossible a rassasier, building on Swedish poet, writer and playwright Stig Dagerman.
Bérangère Maximin has been composer-in-residence at the studios of the Electroacoustic Group of Cuenca, Spain, and she has worked in the Ukraine, and she is invited by Groupe de Recherches Musicales in the season 2005/2006.
In Paris, where she now resides, she keeps her own studio, by the name Home Sweet Home.

Track 2: Bérangère Maximin: Tant que les heures passent (As Long As the Hours Go By): Adapted from the poetic works of Vladimir Maïakovski [12’00’’] (2005)

Maximin on Maïakovski:

The sense of organ pipes, blurry barrel organ pipes – and bubbling methane through water; plus insect hints: entomology of the audios… slowly and hypnotically sliding into a shaman’s journey to the Hinterlands and back, behind the mountains and into the darkness, smelling the scent of dark forces that hide good medicine from the humans.

As the circling shaman ride slows down into the midst of Time, eyes look into a campfire. In this transcendental state of mind - In darkness and death – birch wood birds sing splinter wood fire songs.

There is so much poetry in this sound art. I try to think thoughts that fit this dangerous beauty as I listen and get lost in my listening. The shaman still sits in front of his fire. I dream thoughts of lossless beauty. A cat’s meow and a Saami drum, alien birds of prey and pray: strange marks on my forehead: a rebounding spring – and I understand that this is Maximum Maximin, riding the forces right into the Eros of my Earthbound body, stroking the muscles and tendons under my skin, traveling the electricity of my nerve-paths, illuminating my skull in pulsating eroticism… Enjoy me, I’m yours, in this music, I’m lost and found, leaving and coming, waking up into restless sleep of purple emotions… Ah, Bérangère…

The Third participant comes from Mexico: Rodrigo Sigal - with the work Friction of Things in Other Places.
He was born in the giant, hot, stuffy and polluted cauldron of mass-invasive Mexico City in 1971. He has studied at City University of London, with Denis Smalley and Javier Alvarez, bringing him a splendid start of a career in sound. I especially enjoy Javier Alvarez’s CD Papalotl (Saydisc CD-SDL 390). Alvarez was plenty marketed in Sweden in the 1990s by radio producer Bosse Bergqvist, but I haven’t heard much from Alvarez lately.

There is no lack of Sigal audio out there, though. He is represented on no less than 10 CDs.

Check in at www.rodrigosigal.com

Track 3: Rodrigo Sigal: Friction of Things in Other Places [08’00’’] (2002)

Small sounds fluttering about in swarms on a backdrop of distant night-sky drones; coins spinning on tables of hardwood or marble floors. The events are miniscule, like unseen nocturnal animals rusting about in dry leaves below castle windows.

The spinning roundabout audio from initial coins provide a sticky, gluey, flycatcher temptation for the erratic motions, the cut-up shreds that fly like soot from forest fires. Into this suspense Sigal introduces bouncing in-the-barrel water events, microphone hanging from a cord into the midst of barrel darkness – and voices, shreds of voices, amass discontent but tight, like compressed language, chewed and chewed, saliva emitted through the palisade of teeth, skulls grinning through the ages: carnival resemblances confusing the soul. Paper is wrinkled, muffled within earshot – sonic tigers moving around the periphery, hungry for prey.
You lose yourself in a prolonged, extended and swelling church bell that never ends: just one eternal toll; a heartbeat through time, on the beat, on the hour, on time – always.

Diego Garro brings a piece called Systemfehler! Reminds me of another title; Three Variations on Kein Fehler im System, by Eugene Gomringer – but that is something else…
Diego Garro is Italian, born in 1965, and has got a BSc in Electronic Engineering at The University of Padova. He has studied Electroacoustic music at Keele University, and he teaches there: electroacoustic music, music technology and computer video art.

Track 4: Diego Garro: Systemfehler [10’17’’] (2004)

Deigo Garro talks in his introduction about working with un-musical sound material, like dull ringing tones, harsh sonic spurts and more. I don’t like this notion, about certain sounds being un-musical – but I DO NOT want to get into a line of reasoning about what constitutes music: if it indeed is organized sound and nothing else… I just feel that getting onto a CD that deals specifically with sound art with the notion that the sounds used are un-musical and even hard to use, is very strange… Let’s overlook that strangeness of reasoning now and listen!

OK, as I begin to listen I get the hang of it some more… but I still think it’s pretty stupid – and not a piece you can listen top more than once… The beginning is in itself an introduction to the piece, spoken in over-explicit English, stating exactly what kind of sounds or sound-objects will be heard: mostly shreds of trash audio from failing hard drives, short-circuits and the lot. However, then come permutations of this introduction, by way of cut-ups and various shifts of tempi and pitch and so forth, like in a text-sound composition.

That text-sound episode is short, as the music is transformed into shrapnel and paper-shredder audio, which indeed is quite exciting and enjoyable. Myriads of short static staccati and fast-passing shreds of sound fly by like residue from some catastrophic explosion in middle of time and matter: the planet disintegrated and pulled apart, entropy working its way through what ever still clings to something else.

I’ve heard lots of music like this many times before, especially from independent small labels in the USA, and when cleverly done – like Systemfehler really turns out to be – this special paper shred and soot flake sonority hits home darn well. I was taken aback by Garro’s introductory reasoning, but the music itself gets better and better the longer I listen! Very pleasant music for scruffy ears and humbly insane minds…

Meri von KleinSmid is the impressive name of an American sound artist and composer. She says that she is motivated by the idea that emotions and moods are best expressed through art (unless you want to scream and shout, I suppose…) Nonetheless, she seems to have a humble, direct and very natural approach to sound and sound art – more so than some of the more intellectualized introspections you otherwise find in these kind of semi-biographical notes, which always bore me tired. Therefore I am already before listening very favorable towards Miss KleinSmid.

Track 5: Meri von KleinSmid: The Observation of Curio No19 [01’55’’] (No creation date given)

The short event contains modal as well as white noise audio; pitch and rhythm as well as non-conforming drone states, percussive gleanings, shining bells and a light electronic rain. There is only so much you can do in less than two minutes, but Von KleinSmid manages to fill that short duration with more cool and calm excitement than many sophisticated composers do in hours!!! Then again, Morton Feldman has stated that duration has no meaning as such, and he wrote some pieces that last longer than six hours…

Paul Clouvel comes last in the row of composers on Elektramusic’s first CD, but he arrives two-fold, with two compositions, and I suppose you can’t stop him: his the curator of the project…
This inventive and ingenious boy came onto the planet in France in 1971. He has studied orchestra conducting (not submarine iron ore conducting), composition, harmony and counterpoint, as well as sound art and electroacoustic music and computer music composition. Now if all that studying hasn’t brought at least one really good work onto this CD, I’ll be mad. I’ll listen and we’ll see!

Track 6: Paul Clouvel: Canranc [11’47’’] (2002: revised)
The matter-of-factly background information that Clouvel gives must be quoted!:

Mighty, isn’t it? Really enjoyable. I love those historic accounts. We had a Swedish writer who was a true expert at those short, interesting and always peculiar international stories: Torsten Ehrenmark. He collected his twisted observations while working as a foreign correspondent for Swedish newspapers. Paul Clouvel’s note above reminds me very much of Torsten Ehrenmark; one of my literary heroes!

The music starts in your right ear, if you’re on phones; a radical Beatles stereophony! This isn’t a lasting nuisance, because the overload very soon spreads grace all over the hemisphere. The sounds are unidentifiable, but gradually take on a chamber orchestral guise, into which a Wild West choochoo whistle introduces the railway association. Numerous rhythms and sounds then pile up, one after the other, like shadows cast from a bygone era of steam trains, tracks beaten in break beats, tunnels muffling the roar of heavy motion, relentless inertia of might on the move…

The rhythms arrive at a Central African pygmy percussion and a dream-state alteration of phases: very ingenious and listenable. Vocals are introduced in a backwards, slowing-down spiral, while railway crossing signals are treated like Christmas Carol bells!

Gravel is poured down your left ear, while the likeness of Chowning FM synthesis run down your right ear.

Sometimes in this varied sound world you forget the train trauma, but ever so often you’re reminded by quite natural or slightly altered train sounds, sometimes shooting like brakeman jubilees across the sound space.

Percussion evokes Radio Tirana station calls out of ancient Enver Hoxha communism. Nice work! You name it, we like it!

Track 7: Paul Clouvel: Speech [07’20’’] (2005)

Clouvel brands this an electroacoustic etude, utilizing spoken sentences out of a text by artist and plastician Joël Frémiot with fake musical sequences a la John Cage. Frankly, I don’t know what to make out of that description…
However, the piece is a clever and well executed piece of text-sound and electroacoustics, sliding back and forth between the realms of musique concrète, contemporary instrumental art music and electroacoustics as such! Very nice, full of life and unexpected jolts of sound and modulations, as you’re cast in and out of varying ambiences. Yes!

On the whole, this CD and book provide a very good investment for anyone interested in contemporary art! Well done!