Kwik Picks 01
Some Recent Additions to Sonus.ca
Concordia University, Montréal
Daniel Blinkhorn
Resource 14 — Elements (2005) — 5:12
Resource 14 — Emergence (2005) — 7:11
Keyword(s): acousmatic, exploration of the object
In the realm of the acousmatic, objects explored, transformed, digested — elemental explorations assembled onto sonic surfaces, with relatively continuous change and viewing. The second part is more tightly directed with instruments shifting pallets. The composer’s duality of openness to improvisation and automated processing is lightly juxtaposed with the long tones of the bass clarinet and the semi-stochastic birdsong.
Alan Butler
Smellotape (2005) — 28:32
Keyword(s): open, ambient
Put it on. Carry on working. Listen a bit. Think something else. A MIDI-based piece of open form. Don’t plan on going anywhere, the composer takes you to places you may know and may have seen, but possibly not in this diffuse ambient light. Possibly sound from an installation. (There is no information about the piece or the composer, but http://www.newmediaart.co.uk/about.htm.)
Audrey Churgin
Arctic Sun Arctic Wind (2004) — 4:47
Keyword(s): text, narrative, radiophonic
A page or two from a sonic diary. The word, narrative, flows, bends around the northern mid-summer reality. Layers lay against each other. Sounds support and betray the truth / fiction of the text.
Milena Droumeva
Soundbite Society (2003) — 10:06
Keyword(s): text based
Texts and layered soundscape elements. Processed voice explores the extension of the inner world. The word as raw material, fragmented and splintered, shards of ideas that drift in the mind, sometimes leaving quickly, and other times staying to annoy and perplex. Sounds of various sources and cultural contexts stuck cheek by jowl in an often jovial, occasional wondermented thought. Text flows into processed objects. Words return to soundbite status, focused, diffused, wandering.
Joellen Housego / Jan N. Desrosiers / Randy Peters / Anna Friz
The Harvey Christ Radio Hour presents: The Big Baptizing! (2004) — 13:37
Keyword(s): radiophonic, text, live improvisation
Quasi-live montage, sound art collage of four loonies loose in a stoodio. A bit of spoofery of humor and foolishness. Documentation of a frolicsome romp. Live instruments, sound effects, close harmony, but no great harm here.
Emmanuel Madan
Freedom Highway (part 1) (2004) — 4:53
Keyword(s): text sound, soundscape
Talk radio talk talk talk talk talk talk talk in time it becomes the surface and the background. In nine parts, ever changing in the same way, baseball to balderdash to advertising and preaching, from truth seeking and lying to lying about seeking truths. A pervasive unattached commentary on the perversely unattached American talk talk talk talk talk radio mind.
In nine parts. Argue and rant. And self-justification. It’s really going on talk talk talk talk talk radio. With forgotten sounds of radio in the middle of nowhereland.
Mike McFerron
9.17.2003 (2003) — 4:48
Keyword(s): semi-acousmatic, soundscape composition
A playful non-documentary montage of sounds extracted from a busy hallway — soundscape materials as materials for musical exploration. Fluid, semi-improvisatory, well-formed, textures to pass you by and to engulf. Feel the grooves flow. A gentle statement regarding time and perspectives.
Jay Needham
Blacktop (2004) — 12:42
Keyword(s): text, radiophonic, narrative
A semi-narrative text yields to inner wanderings. Close your eyes and give yourself over to the apparent stories that unfold and dissolve in and around your ears. The narrative returns, bringing back the neutral presence. Sounds beyond and around allow the space to expand, contract and return, not morose, but rememberful.
Alexis Perepelycia
Esquizofrénia (Schizophrenia) (2004) — 10:00
Keyword(s): semi-narrative, acousmatic
Rude electronic game sounds as symbols for the disintegration of a mind. The plastic sounds portray through crudeness a disconnection to reality. Being broadly sectional in nature (two parts), there is time in the second section to pause and consider. The process of ‘considering’ being bent into directions by the composer’s choice to juxtapose in the mind the annoying external with the unremoveable internal. Memory that won’t let go away.
Joan Schuman
Walking in Bad Circles (2004) — 3:27
Keyword(s): text, radiophonic, narrative
From a radio documentary and audio art background, text is central in her revealing the social and psychological conditions of her central protagonist. Almost as if walking beside the speaker who has hit bad times, the distant and passing trains, with the local bar noises contribute to the sense of isolation and disconnection.
Debashis Sinha
redo / speaking song (2001) — 4:50
Keyword(s): open collage
A multi-layered acoustic and cultural percussion-based performance. Moments of studio interjection speak of life far away, and then there is the fragmentation of these soundscapes that draws attention to the editor, crosscut with the percussion tracks … which to listen to as foreground? Maybe there is only foreground.
Eldad Tsabary
The Soul of the City (2004) — 7:59
Keyword(s): acousmatic, ambient
Cityscapes, outscapes and inscapes. Sonic transformations can belie which direction the journey really goes. A closer listening of the inner textures both binds and disorients as the mind often wants to move in two directions at once. Was that a voice? nearby or perhaps in a laneway, possibly a cul-de-sac of the mind’s eye?
Gregory Whitehead
As We Know (0000) — 2:26
Keyword(s): text, live improvisation with extensions
A live / mixed / processed performance — the extended voice. A miniature sound-text composition on the border between the comic and the truly fearful.
Richard Windeyer
In Silent Time (2004) — 12:22
Keyword(s): text, radiophonic, narrative
A sound poet’s collage: studies in per”sona”lities — of the sounds and of the silence(s). Guided collaged narrative leads the listener to outer and inner soundscapes. Sounds of real flow into sounds of hidden silences. The interplay of the real and the imagined, glued one onto another with the power of the remembering narrative. The power of sounds, in this case drums, to evoke and play with the mind. Formed and shaped radiophonic text montaged composition, thinning and thickening, exploring and explaining.
Pamela Z
Pop Titles 'You' (1986) — 03:42
Keyword(s): text-sound, live improvisation with extensions
A live version of this work, sound-text composition using text based on song titles starting with “You” — an entertaining collage that seems so planned and at once so spontaneous, funny and maudlin, mindless and thoughtful.
Kevin Austin
Montréal, 2006–II–17, 18, 19
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