NOËL AKCHOTÉ / ROLAND AUZET / LUC FERRARI
Impro-Micro-Acoustique
(Blue Chopsticks) Used CD $9.00
Impressed by Akchoté mistreating his instrument in his characteristic, inimitable manner, the venerable composer regarded the Parisian guitarist’s solo set as “new, real-time concrete.” Auzet, who had previously performed the demanding percussion part in Ferrari’s Cellule 75, is another obvious choice for this trio, with Ferrari on piano – utterly at home and in-the-moment for this first encounter in 2003. This meticulously crafted assemblage of shifting sonic perspectives is “a play of depths, where individual attacks come abruptly and unpredictably to the fore. Its taut, edge-of-seat, aggressive interplay is deployed within the wondrous frame of Ferrari’s montage.”
Far-West News (1998-99) Episodes Two and Three
(Blue Chopsticks) Used CD $4.00
The core of these recordings, made during a trip across the American Southwest, presents speech-oriented audio snippets — conversations with acquaintances, stops at restaurants and shops, inquiries for directions, tacky Hollywood tours — overlaid and mixed in with tapes of passing automobiles, airplanes flying overhead, minimal electronic tones, disquieting reverberations, and what sound like brief distorted tumbles of synthetic percussion.
Interrupteur / Tautologos 3
(Blue Chopsticks) Used CD $15.00
First recorded by EMI in 1970 and never released in the US prior to this 1999 CD issue on David Grubbs’s label, “Interrupteur (For 10 Instruments)” and “Tautologos 3 (For 11 Instruments)” both depart from the animation and activity of Ferrari’s piecee from the ’50s and ’60s. The former is “an orchestral stasis point that begins to move,” notes All Music Guide. “In the stillness created by the strings, time becomes one long block…, [against which] various timbres and textures rub…, creating muted colors and shades…. [C]hance actions (flurries of woodwinds or brass, a shriek from an errant viola, etc.) … cannot help but to move against that which is already unmoving and therefore deconstruct it…. [C]yclic in nature and [using] a limited scale of notational devices…, [the latter, with its] standard orchestral instrumentation…, electric guitar, and magnetic tape, is … hypnotic … [and] maddening. The [short] musical ‘cycles’ … [move] forward and backward…. During the editing and mixing process, Ferrari manipulated and spliced tape to create other cycles to overlay over the original compositions….The result … drifts and drones its way into the listener’s consciousness and changes right at the point where familiarity is established.” Sealed
Les Arythmiques
(Blue Chopsticks) Used CD $9.00
A starting point of one of the final works by Ferrari is representing in sound the jolt of electricity that had been sent across his heart to treat his arrhythmia. Vaguely terrifying, crackling jolts Les Arythmiques into life and reappears throughout to interrupt the regular beeps of an EKG, the distant tolling of a church bell, and even more distant sounds resembling birds. Enforced rest of a patient immobilized looms over the small repertoire of concrete sounds, examined with a disorienting repetitiveness and ultimately moving beyond the hospital room by delving into an archive of memory.