By Cedrik Fermont
Title Image © Magda Bondos
For many years now, I have been trying to re-write a history of electronic, synthetic, experimental and electro-acoustic and contemporary classical music, especially from Asia and Africa, but this time my wish was to create a playlist that would be more global, one that even includes several known figures that are not systematically picked in an electronic or contemporary classical music selection.
I want this playlist to not only be a journey through time and place, but also through genres and sometimes transnational or transcontinental collaborations.
You will hear pieces that seem to be purely abstract, others politically engaged, others purely experimental by the time they were composed and that maybe sound outdated today, and some that I have included for personal reasons, composers that remain unknown or only known in a small part of the world and have passed away too early. My aim is also to find the relations, themes, similarities that can connect these pieces together.
This selection doesn’t have to be read from track number one down to the last composition; there is no hierarchy and multiple connections can be organized as the listener likes. However, I have tried to create a list which is rather like a mix.
There are links between some of the works that can be easily established; other ones are possibly not so obvious, but I hope you will discover them.
The Soviet Union was one of the world leaders in term of electronic and synthetic music from as early as the 1920s and 1930s. This is thanks not only to Leon Theremin, but also other composers such as Arseny Avraamov and Nikolai Voinov to name but three. Accordingly, I thought this playlist should start with a composer from the former Soviet Union.
Known best for her classical music compositions, Sofia Gubaidulina also experimented with the photoelectronic ANS synthesizer, which was developed by the Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin between 1937-57. This synthesizer’s technique was not too distant from the variophone, an optical synthesizer developed by Yevgeny Sholpo in 1930; the Lichttonorgel (›light-tone organ‹) developed during the 1920s by Edwin Welte; the drawn sound technique of Norman McLaren from the 1940s; or from the Oramics Machine, another optical sound synthesis instrument developed by Daphne Oram in 1957.
Gubaidulina’s piece is a beautiful trip back in time, a cinematic composition full of emotions.
Natela Svanidze, another composer who was active in the Soviet Union, is known for her classical music pieces: symphonies, oratorios as well as some improvisation and prepared piano works. Nevertheless, her piece Epitaphium has re-emerged after almost 50 years.
This is another piece that clearly sends the listener back in time and we may regret that she didn’t compose more electronic pieces. She said once: » I regret to say that I have come early… I was born for electronic music, but with virtually no technical capabilities to create such music in my time…«
Mireille Chamass-Kyrou is unfortunately one of the long-forgotten composers due to the fact that, after working at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, she left in order to prioritize family life and to raise two sons, Ariel and Axel.
Whether or not the legacies of composers such as Chamass-Kyrou and Natela Svanidze have been affected by their disappearances from the musical scene or because most of their other compositions obscured their electronic or experimental works is not a big issue to me. The fact that these composers experimented back then is very important in itself.
Nevertheless, it seems that Chamass-Kyrou definitely left a legacy: from the early 1980s her two sons have been active members of the ethno-industrial band Vox Populi!, which is probably not an accident.
Luo Jing Jing is a renowned composer born and raised in China. Apart from her orchestral, chamber music and opera, she has composed electroacoustic and mixed music pieces since at least 1986 and is therefore one of the earliest Chinese composers operating in this field. Nevertheless, I rarely see her name mentioned in the history of electroacoustic music in China or next to other pioneers such as Yuanlin Chen and Zhang Xiaofu who made their first electronic music experiments in Beijing in 1984.
Monologue is not the only electroacoustic or mixed music composition that she made; several other pieces are also worth mentioning, especially Ashima Monodrama (2015-16).
Graciela Paraskevaídis was an Argentine writer and composer who lived and worked in Uruguay.
From the 1960s, she composed contemporary classical music, tape music and electroacoustic music. Some of her compositions such as Huauqui or Todavía no (1979) embrace extreme minimalism.
She is not an oddity from a distant region: electroacoustic, tape and modern classical music have well been represented in many Latin-American countries since the 1950s. Graciela Paraskevaídis is one of the many pioneers who have made contemporary music what it is today.
Yugoslavia had a rich history of contemporary, electronic, experimental and alternative music, whether we speak about industrial music, punk or tape experiments. Despite this, and possibly due to the fact that the country was neither aligned to the West nor to the East and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of its past or present composers still remain little known outside of the former Yugoslavia.
I have chosen this piece by Mladen Milićević (also known as Igor Krik) because to me it somehow reflects what Yugoslavia was: a place in between. Ac. Guit could be perceived as a minimal music composition in classical music circles. but it could perfectly fit in the spirit of the independent experimental and industrial music from that time, too.
Minimal music (in Western culture) expresses itself in various forms and is partly rooted in some Indonesian and African music. This trio’s Cosmic Rhythm Vibrations blends Nigerian rhythms, jazz and contemporary classical music. It is not only about rhythm, but timbre as well, a characteristic that reminds me of some Batak music from Sumatra and around.
José Maceda is a well-known ethnomusicologist, composer and performer from the Philippines who, despite the Marcos harsh dictatorship, has managed to create impressive performances such as Cassettes 100.
Maceda’s Cassette 100 (for 100 cassette players) as well as Ugnayan, another composition for 20 radio stations, are the closest compositions to musique concrète he has made, while those able to hear this work on site would also detects elements drawn from performance art, sound art and even acousmatic music.
Electroacoustic and contemporary classical music are not known to be the most political genres ever. Nevertheless, examples are found easily enough, as many composers have created work which deal with politics, war, gender issues, etc.
Victor Gama’s specific piece speaks about the civil war in Angola and is emotionally strong. Its content reminds me of Freddie Hubbard and İlhan Mimaroğlu’s album, Sing Me A Song Of Songmy (A Fantasy For Electromagnetic Tape) (1971), one of the few electroacoustic music albums from that period that openly carried a political and anti-war message.
Gülce Özen Gürkan’s composition is another sociopolitical one. She provided this piece for a compilation I was working on, explaining that the piece had been partly censored in Istanbul, due to its content and title. Dealing with LGBT rights, bullying, suicide and religion is quite a challenge in Turkey.
When I heard the piece, it immediately evoked İlhan Mimaroğlu’s work as well. This ›old fashioned‹ way of composing and the carried message is powerful, although rougher, though, but also touching and disheartening.
Gülce Özen Gürkan is an LGBTIQ+ and vegan activist who uses her music as a vehicle to share her views as an activist, human rights and animal rights defender.
Like Gülce Özen Gürkan, Sukitoa o Namau comes from a younger generation. She, too, is an animal right activist, even though she doesn’t systematically deal with this topic and may compose more abstract pieces that blend field recordings, electronics and electroacoustic processing. This piece is an interesting collage made of various – voices, bird song, trains, and reversed percussions that sound like mutant rhythms.
This is a collaborative project between artists from Taiwan and Hong Kong and one of the few recordings of Anchih Tsai, who left us too early.
She lived in Dulan, an Ami village in Taiwan and a hub for indigenous artefacts and culture. This might sound an unusual location for an experimental music artist and it is possibly a reason that she is not so well known (if at all) outside Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and China.
I selected this piece, not only due to its connection to traditional music but because Anchih gave me the opportunity to perform in this village and her work reconnects me to this unique experience.
This is a trace from the past that most people have never heard about, an interrupted history of experimental music due to Anchih Tsai’s disappearance, some music I wish to not see buried forever.
Myanmar is not known to be a hub for experimental music, nevertheless, for more than 15 years, a small but expanding team of composers have been experimenting with sound, compose contemporary classical and free improvised music.
This composition by Zin Htet is also connected to its surroundings: a track that includes a selection of street sellers’ voices: hawkers selling cell phones. The calls are mixed with electronics and traditional elements. The quietness, perhaps emptiness, provides an intriguing result for those who know the noisy streets of Yangon.
Void is another way of exploring urban field recordings, this time dealing with the noisy environment in the streets of Colombo. This piece could have been composed in Yangon, Jakarta, Hanoi, Cairo or Bengaluru: insane traffic and vehicles honking non-stop. Noise is part of people’s daily life and Isuru Kumarasinghe craftily adds discrete glitches, feedbacks and noises here and there, forcing the listener to focus on his musical addition to the supersonic atmosphere.
If the so-called global South seems to often be omitted in the contemporary, experimental and electronic music world, what could be said about indigenous people? They have often been rendered invisible such as if no one could imagine they could also be part of the contemporary music world.
That said, for a few years now, Native American experimental and contemporary classical music composers such as Laura Ortman or Nathan Young to name two have slowly received a well-deserved recognition.
This extract is a voice improvisation over Raven Chacon’s electronic soundtrack, a unique modern opera that doesn’t make use of field recordings or samples of traditional songs of music.
Slamet Abdul Sjukur composed Indonesian and Western classical music as well as tape and electronic music. Even though his first tape composition (Latigrak, for tape and gamelan orchestra) was made in 1963, he is mostly unknown outside of Indonesia and some small circles.
This piece for voice and angklung also blends contemporary classical and traditional music together and is not that far from some of José Maceda’s compositions – both composers spent some time at the GRM in Paris.
A very powerful piece, Jangelma blends specific traditional music with contemporary classical music without falling into the trap of kitschy “world music‹. Perhaps less adventurous and not as experimental as Sjukur or Maceda, this is nonetheless for me a masterpiece for cello and voice.
This track flirts with contemporary classical music and tape music with the voice of Susan Frykberg’s her sister Margaret Bendall opening and closing the composition. In Frykberg’s own admission, this work is based structurally and textually on the process of Margaret giving birth.
It is one of those few electroacoustic music pieces that deals with a definite reality and not a situation of pure abstraction.
Duo Moment is a free improvisation pairing of Khabat Abas and Hardi Kurda, both Kurdish composers who not only use string instruments in a conventional sense but also hijack them to create new techniques.
Abas bases her work on sound research, beginning with the acoustic cello, prepared cello and adapted cello (a cello made of recycled bombshell), while Kurda improvises and experiments with the violin but also electronics (in other compositions and sound installations).
This current piece was performed online for Space21 radio art festival in Kurdistan during the lockdown in 2020. It represents one of the still rare opportunities for Kurdish artists to present their contemporary works to a large audience in Kurdistan.
Known for his chamber music composition, Ruben Abrahamyan has been composing electroacoustic music since the early 2000s. This is a brilliant composition for fixed media that makes an excellent use of pre-recorded string instruments.
Kosovo was also part of Yugoslavia, so it shouldn’t be entirely exceptional to meet one electroacoustic composer from the tiny country even if the focus of the media may distract us from such a fact.
Emotion Machine seems to refer to us, humans, and our various emotions and ways to express ourselves. Donika Rudi’s amazingly well-crafted and powerful work uses only the human voice – shouts, exclamations, whispers – to move her listeners from one emotional state to another.
Hasnizam Abdul Wahid is one of the pioneers of Malaysian electroacoustic and computer music. Most of his works represent his interest in exploring the domain of sounds. Rahah is a composition that takes its sounds from badminton, a hugely popular sport in Maaysia. The main sound sources come from the players and movements which are then transposed into a dynamic music composition.
Zad Moultaka uses fundamental human sounds – those of breathing – to create Landescape’s sound field. Various other noises skitter in the in the background, creating a tension to a composition that refers to the closed shutters of a bedroom during a bombing and a child’s imaginary landscapes.
The work is not overtly sociopolitical unless one reads the text presented during the audiovisual exhibition. That said, it carries a strong emotional charge.
Cuba is one more country that is rarely added to the electroacoustic map, and yet since the 1960s, several composers from the Caribbean country have been active in this field.
Cosmos Obscura was originally created for eight channels and it uses a collection of sounds from nature as well as pure electronics. The result, as the title may suggest, is a piece that evokes the cosmos, the void, a journey into unknown territories or… pure abstraction and this is the beauty of it.
Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski are clarinetists and improvisers who, on In Doubt We Trust, present here a minimalistic and unimprovised composition that without any doubt is reminiscent of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China (1962). However, In Doubt is, of course, more than that. Parts of the composition may sound electronic or processed but they’re really not, trust me. This is an all-acoustic composition, a real meditative masterpiece.
Hasan Hujairi says that Natural Politics 2.0 is an animated graphic score that was first presented at Alternative Artspace Ipo in Seoul, South Korea in 2013. The project explores the notion of narrative/text in methods that can expand beyond linear time. The piece is of infinite duration when heard on site, it sounds somehow like a prepared piano with, sometimes in the background, animal ›voices‹ appearing and disappearing.
Playing the piano in a non-orthodox way isn’t new, but I see some freedom and a bit of humor in this piece. It’s maybe only my impression and not intended.
Contatto (›Contact‹ in Italian) seems to be a piece that works best if we look at the pianist turned into a performance artist whose relationship (contact) with the instrument shows us all the tricks used in the composition. Unlike with most electronic and tape music performances, this time there is nothing behind closed doors.
For gong rods, toy pianos, harp, metal tubes, bass drum, tom and electronics, Bakunawa is a composition that the composer Pak Yan Lau performed with her ensemble consisting of the musicians Giovanni Di Domenico, Vera Cavallin, Joao Lobo, Mathieu Calleja, and Christophe Albertijn.
In Bakunawa Part II, the percussion and toy pianos are used like what they also are: percussion instruments. The composition evokes the sounds of Indonesian, Filipino and Malay gamelan orchestras, while the generated mechanical polyrhythms remind me of the experimental toy music compositions of Christophe Petchanatz aka Klimperei.
Julia Looking For A Job is not only an electronic music composition for synthetic voice, the voice of a computer that desperately looks for a job, friends and love, it is also a humorous (or perhaps tragicomic) piece of electroacoustic music. As humor is often absent in this genre of music, I thought this piece is worth mentioning.
Water is one of the several compositions made during an online workshop of the Darmstadt Summer Course 2021. Composers and sound artists from three continents were invited to think and collaborate during the summer course; however, because of the pandemic, physically meeting was possible.
Asma Ghanem, Linda Mudimba, the SARANA duo (Annisa Maharani and Sabrina Felisiana), PHER (Farzané) and [M O N R H E A], together with AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti) and myself (Cedrik Fermont), met online during 11 days, discussed, exchanged experiences and ideas, field recordings, voices, etc., in order to create several audio exquisite corpses, exploring various themes deemed important such as our relationship to the environment and how to reflect this and our various cultures and languages into the pieces.
FEN (Far East Network) is an international quartet made of Yuen Chee Wai, Yan Jun, Ryu Hankil and Otomo Yoshihide.
Side B is a slowly evolving music piece that mingles free improvised music, ambient rock, noise rock and noise music, each artist expressing themself in a different way and bringing their own vast experiences of experimental music work into the mix. The musicians have also built a strong network between and inside their respective countries, and consequently know how to interact and create a composition in which each instrument or each noise supports the others.
Okkyung Lee, a member of the experimental chamber music Yeo-Neun Quartet, presents us an unconventional way of performing and recording the cello. She is produced and recorded by the Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug. If you know his work, you may not be surprised with the result; if you know her work… she’ll demonstrate her skills once more, but not (this time) for sensitive ears.
This is one of Lee’s most abrasive pieces so far, as it flirts with improvised and noise music without any compromise.
This is a half-hour piece that slowly evolves from a gentle noise environment into a gigantic wall of distorted sound.
Writher is a renowned noise music artist and hip-hop producer who is based in Ho Chi Minh City. I must admit that I couldn’t find a lot of information about ThaoNOK, whose name sounds Thai. I selected this piece especially for Vũ Nhật Tân, the acclaimed Vietnamese composer, who is also impressively creative and open-minded. One of the oldest electroacoustic and noise music composers and performers in Vietnam, he has composed a lot of chamber music and classical music pieces that put align Vietnamese traditional and classical music as well as European classical music.
He unfortunately passed away in 2020 and this is the last piece of this selection: it is a noisy proof that Vũ Nhật Tân was not afraid to challenge his audience. I hope he will be remembered for ever.
By Cedrik Fermont
Title Image © Magda Bondos
For many years now, I have been trying to re-write a history of electronic, synthetic, experimental and electro-acoustic and contemporary classical music, especially from Asia and Africa, but this time my wish was to create a playlist that would be more global, one that even includes several known figures that are not systematically picked in an electronic or contemporary classical music selection.
I want this playlist to not only be a journey through time and place, but also through genres and sometimes transnational or transcontinental collaborations.
You will hear pieces that seem to be purely abstract, others politically engaged, others purely experimental by the time they were composed and that maybe sound outdated today, and some that I have included for personal reasons, composers that remain unknown or only known in a small part of the world and have passed away too early. My aim is also to find the relations, themes, similarities that can connect these pieces together.
This selection doesn’t have to be read from track number one down to the last composition; there is no hierarchy and multiple connections can be organized as the listener likes. However, I have tried to create a list which is rather like a mix.
There are links between some of the works that can be easily established; other ones are possibly not so obvious, but I hope you will discover them.
The Soviet Union was one of the world leaders in term of electronic and synthetic music from as early as the 1920s and 1930s. This is thanks not only to Leon Theremin, but also other composers such as Arseny Avraamov and Nikolai Voinov to name but three. Accordingly, I thought this playlist should start with a composer from the former Soviet Union.
Known best for her classical music compositions, Sofia Gubaidulina also experimented with the photoelectronic ANS synthesizer, which was developed by the Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin between 1937-57. This synthesizer’s technique was not too distant from the variophone, an optical synthesizer developed by Yevgeny Sholpo in 1930; the Lichttonorgel (›light-tone organ‹) developed during the 1920s by Edwin Welte; the drawn sound technique of Norman McLaren from the 1940s; or from the Oramics Machine, another optical sound synthesis instrument developed by Daphne Oram in 1957.
Gubaidulina’s piece is a beautiful trip back in time, a cinematic composition full of emotions.
Natela Svanidze, another composer who was active in the Soviet Union, is known for her classical music pieces: symphonies, oratorios as well as some improvisation and prepared piano works. Nevertheless, her piece Epitaphium has re-emerged after almost 50 years.
This is another piece that clearly sends the listener back in time and we may regret that she didn’t compose more electronic pieces. She said once: » I regret to say that I have come early… I was born for electronic music, but with virtually no technical capabilities to create such music in my time…«
Mireille Chamass-Kyrou is unfortunately one of the long-forgotten composers due to the fact that, after working at the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris, she left in order to prioritize family life and to raise two sons, Ariel and Axel.
Whether or not the legacies of composers such as Chamass-Kyrou and Natela Svanidze have been affected by their disappearances from the musical scene or because most of their other compositions obscured their electronic or experimental works is not a big issue to me. The fact that these composers experimented back then is very important in itself.
Nevertheless, it seems that Chamass-Kyrou definitely left a legacy: from the early 1980s her two sons have been active members of the ethno-industrial band Vox Populi!, which is probably not an accident.
Luo Jing Jing is a renowned composer born and raised in China. Apart from her orchestral, chamber music and opera, she has composed electroacoustic and mixed music pieces since at least 1986 and is therefore one of the earliest Chinese composers operating in this field. Nevertheless, I rarely see her name mentioned in the history of electroacoustic music in China or next to other pioneers such as Yuanlin Chen and Zhang Xiaofu who made their first electronic music experiments in Beijing in 1984.
Monologue is not the only electroacoustic or mixed music composition that she made; several other pieces are also worth mentioning, especially Ashima Monodrama (2015-16).
Graciela Paraskevaídis was an Argentine writer and composer who lived and worked in Uruguay.
From the 1960s, she composed contemporary classical music, tape music and electroacoustic music. Some of her compositions such as Huauqui or Todavía no (1979) embrace extreme minimalism.
She is not an oddity from a distant region: electroacoustic, tape and modern classical music have well been represented in many Latin-American countries since the 1950s. Graciela Paraskevaídis is one of the many pioneers who have made contemporary music what it is today.
Yugoslavia had a rich history of contemporary, electronic, experimental and alternative music, whether we speak about industrial music, punk or tape experiments. Despite this, and possibly due to the fact that the country was neither aligned to the West nor to the East and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of its past or present composers still remain little known outside of the former Yugoslavia.
I have chosen this piece by Mladen Milićević (also known as Igor Krik) because to me it somehow reflects what Yugoslavia was: a place in between. Ac. Guit could be perceived as a minimal music composition in classical music circles. but it could perfectly fit in the spirit of the independent experimental and industrial music from that time, too.
Minimal music (in Western culture) expresses itself in various forms and is partly rooted in some Indonesian and African music. This trio’s Cosmic Rhythm Vibrations blends Nigerian rhythms, jazz and contemporary classical music. It is not only about rhythm, but timbre as well, a characteristic that reminds me of some Batak music from Sumatra and around.
José Maceda is a well-known ethnomusicologist, composer and performer from the Philippines who, despite the Marcos harsh dictatorship, has managed to create impressive performances such as Cassettes 100.
Maceda’s Cassette 100 (for 100 cassette players) as well as Ugnayan, another composition for 20 radio stations, are the closest compositions to musique concrète he has made, while those able to hear this work on site would also detects elements drawn from performance art, sound art and even acousmatic music.
Electroacoustic and contemporary classical music are not known to be the most political genres ever. Nevertheless, examples are found easily enough, as many composers have created work which deal with politics, war, gender issues, etc.
Victor Gama’s specific piece speaks about the civil war in Angola and is emotionally strong. Its content reminds me of Freddie Hubbard and İlhan Mimaroğlu’s album, Sing Me A Song Of Songmy (A Fantasy For Electromagnetic Tape) (1971), one of the few electroacoustic music albums from that period that openly carried a political and anti-war message.
Gülce Özen Gürkan’s composition is another sociopolitical one. She provided this piece for a compilation I was working on, explaining that the piece had been partly censored in Istanbul, due to its content and title. Dealing with LGBT rights, bullying, suicide and religion is quite a challenge in Turkey.
When I heard the piece, it immediately evoked İlhan Mimaroğlu’s work as well. This ›old fashioned‹ way of composing and the carried message is powerful, although rougher, though, but also touching and disheartening.
Gülce Özen Gürkan is an LGBTIQ+ and vegan activist who uses her music as a vehicle to share her views as an activist, human rights and animal rights defender.
Like Gülce Özen Gürkan, Sukitoa o Namau comes from a younger generation. She, too, is an animal right activist, even though she doesn’t systematically deal with this topic and may compose more abstract pieces that blend field recordings, electronics and electroacoustic processing. This piece is an interesting collage made of various – voices, bird song, trains, and reversed percussions that sound like mutant rhythms.
This is a collaborative project between artists from Taiwan and Hong Kong and one of the few recordings of Anchih Tsai, who left us too early.
She lived in Dulan, an Ami village in Taiwan and a hub for indigenous artefacts and culture. This might sound an unusual location for an experimental music artist and it is possibly a reason that she is not so well known (if at all) outside Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and China.
I selected this piece, not only due to its connection to traditional music but because Anchih gave me the opportunity to perform in this village and her work reconnects me to this unique experience.
This is a trace from the past that most people have never heard about, an interrupted history of experimental music due to Anchih Tsai’s disappearance, some music I wish to not see buried forever.
Myanmar is not known to be a hub for experimental music, nevertheless, for more than 15 years, a small but expanding team of composers have been experimenting with sound, compose contemporary classical and free improvised music.
This composition by Zin Htet is also connected to its surroundings: a track that includes a selection of street sellers’ voices: hawkers selling cell phones. The calls are mixed with electronics and traditional elements. The quietness, perhaps emptiness, provides an intriguing result for those who know the noisy streets of Yangon.
Void is another way of exploring urban field recordings, this time dealing with the noisy environment in the streets of Colombo. This piece could have been composed in Yangon, Jakarta, Hanoi, Cairo or Bengaluru: insane traffic and vehicles honking non-stop. Noise is part of people’s daily life and Isuru Kumarasinghe craftily adds discrete glitches, feedbacks and noises here and there, forcing the listener to focus on his musical addition to the supersonic atmosphere.
If the so-called global South seems to often be omitted in the contemporary, experimental and electronic music world, what could be said about indigenous people? They have often been rendered invisible such as if no one could imagine they could also be part of the contemporary music world.
That said, for a few years now, Native American experimental and contemporary classical music composers such as Laura Ortman or Nathan Young to name two have slowly received a well-deserved recognition.
This extract is a voice improvisation over Raven Chacon’s electronic soundtrack, a unique modern opera that doesn’t make use of field recordings or samples of traditional songs of music.
Slamet Abdul Sjukur composed Indonesian and Western classical music as well as tape and electronic music. Even though his first tape composition (Latigrak, for tape and gamelan orchestra) was made in 1963, he is mostly unknown outside of Indonesia and some small circles.
This piece for voice and angklung also blends contemporary classical and traditional music together and is not that far from some of José Maceda’s compositions – both composers spent some time at the GRM in Paris.
A very powerful piece, Jangelma blends specific traditional music with contemporary classical music without falling into the trap of kitschy “world music‹. Perhaps less adventurous and not as experimental as Sjukur or Maceda, this is nonetheless for me a masterpiece for cello and voice.
This track flirts with contemporary classical music and tape music with the voice of Susan Frykberg’s her sister Margaret Bendall opening and closing the composition. In Frykberg’s own admission, this work is based structurally and textually on the process of Margaret giving birth.
It is one of those few electroacoustic music pieces that deals with a definite reality and not a situation of pure abstraction.
Duo Moment is a free improvisation pairing of Khabat Abas and Hardi Kurda, both Kurdish composers who not only use string instruments in a conventional sense but also hijack them to create new techniques.
Abas bases her work on sound research, beginning with the acoustic cello, prepared cello and adapted cello (a cello made of recycled bombshell), while Kurda improvises and experiments with the violin but also electronics (in other compositions and sound installations).
This current piece was performed online for Space21 radio art festival in Kurdistan during the lockdown in 2020. It represents one of the still rare opportunities for Kurdish artists to present their contemporary works to a large audience in Kurdistan.
Known for his chamber music composition, Ruben Abrahamyan has been composing electroacoustic music since the early 2000s. This is a brilliant composition for fixed media that makes an excellent use of pre-recorded string instruments.
Kosovo was also part of Yugoslavia, so it shouldn’t be entirely exceptional to meet one electroacoustic composer from the tiny country even if the focus of the media may distract us from such a fact.
Emotion Machine seems to refer to us, humans, and our various emotions and ways to express ourselves. Donika Rudi’s amazingly well-crafted and powerful work uses only the human voice – shouts, exclamations, whispers – to move her listeners from one emotional state to another.
Hasnizam Abdul Wahid is one of the pioneers of Malaysian electroacoustic and computer music. Most of his works represent his interest in exploring the domain of sounds. Rahah is a composition that takes its sounds from badminton, a hugely popular sport in Maaysia. The main sound sources come from the players and movements which are then transposed into a dynamic music composition.
Zad Moultaka uses fundamental human sounds – those of breathing – to create Landescape’s sound field. Various other noises skitter in the in the background, creating a tension to a composition that refers to the closed shutters of a bedroom during a bombing and a child’s imaginary landscapes.
The work is not overtly sociopolitical unless one reads the text presented during the audiovisual exhibition. That said, it carries a strong emotional charge.
Cuba is one more country that is rarely added to the electroacoustic map, and yet since the 1960s, several composers from the Caribbean country have been active in this field.
Cosmos Obscura was originally created for eight channels and it uses a collection of sounds from nature as well as pure electronics. The result, as the title may suggest, is a piece that evokes the cosmos, the void, a journey into unknown territories or… pure abstraction and this is the beauty of it.
Michael Thieke and Kai Fagaschinski are clarinetists and improvisers who, on In Doubt We Trust, present here a minimalistic and unimprovised composition that without any doubt is reminiscent of La Monte Young’s The Second Dream Of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China (1962). However, In Doubt is, of course, more than that. Parts of the composition may sound electronic or processed but they’re really not, trust me. This is an all-acoustic composition, a real meditative masterpiece.
Hasan Hujairi says that Natural Politics 2.0 is an animated graphic score that was first presented at Alternative Artspace Ipo in Seoul, South Korea in 2013. The project explores the notion of narrative/text in methods that can expand beyond linear time. The piece is of infinite duration when heard on site, it sounds somehow like a prepared piano with, sometimes in the background, animal ›voices‹ appearing and disappearing.
Playing the piano in a non-orthodox way isn’t new, but I see some freedom and a bit of humor in this piece. It’s maybe only my impression and not intended.
Contatto (›Contact‹ in Italian) seems to be a piece that works best if we look at the pianist turned into a performance artist whose relationship (contact) with the instrument shows us all the tricks used in the composition. Unlike with most electronic and tape music performances, this time there is nothing behind closed doors.
For gong rods, toy pianos, harp, metal tubes, bass drum, tom and electronics, Bakunawa is a composition that the composer Pak Yan Lau performed with her ensemble consisting of the musicians Giovanni Di Domenico, Vera Cavallin, Joao Lobo, Mathieu Calleja, and Christophe Albertijn.
In Bakunawa Part II, the percussion and toy pianos are used like what they also are: percussion instruments. The composition evokes the sounds of Indonesian, Filipino and Malay gamelan orchestras, while the generated mechanical polyrhythms remind me of the experimental toy music compositions of Christophe Petchanatz aka Klimperei.
Julia Looking For A Job is not only an electronic music composition for synthetic voice, the voice of a computer that desperately looks for a job, friends and love, it is also a humorous (or perhaps tragicomic) piece of electroacoustic music. As humor is often absent in this genre of music, I thought this piece is worth mentioning.
Water is one of the several compositions made during an online workshop of the Darmstadt Summer Course 2021. Composers and sound artists from three continents were invited to think and collaborate during the summer course; however, because of the pandemic, physically meeting was possible.
Asma Ghanem, Linda Mudimba, the SARANA duo (Annisa Maharani and Sabrina Felisiana), PHER (Farzané) and [M O N R H E A], together with AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti) and myself (Cedrik Fermont), met online during 11 days, discussed, exchanged experiences and ideas, field recordings, voices, etc., in order to create several audio exquisite corpses, exploring various themes deemed important such as our relationship to the environment and how to reflect this and our various cultures and languages into the pieces.
FEN (Far East Network) is an international quartet made of Yuen Chee Wai, Yan Jun, Ryu Hankil and Otomo Yoshihide.
Side B is a slowly evolving music piece that mingles free improvised music, ambient rock, noise rock and noise music, each artist expressing themself in a different way and bringing their own vast experiences of experimental music work into the mix. The musicians have also built a strong network between and inside their respective countries, and consequently know how to interact and create a composition in which each instrument or each noise supports the others.
Okkyung Lee, a member of the experimental chamber music Yeo-Neun Quartet, presents us an unconventional way of performing and recording the cello. She is produced and recorded by the Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug. If you know his work, you may not be surprised with the result; if you know her work… she’ll demonstrate her skills once more, but not (this time) for sensitive ears.
This is one of Lee’s most abrasive pieces so far, as it flirts with improvised and noise music without any compromise.
This is a half-hour piece that slowly evolves from a gentle noise environment into a gigantic wall of distorted sound.
Writher is a renowned noise music artist and hip-hop producer who is based in Ho Chi Minh City. I must admit that I couldn’t find a lot of information about ThaoNOK, whose name sounds Thai. I selected this piece especially for Vũ Nhật Tân, the acclaimed Vietnamese composer, who is also impressively creative and open-minded. One of the oldest electroacoustic and noise music composers and performers in Vietnam, he has composed a lot of chamber music and classical music pieces that put align Vietnamese traditional and classical music as well as European classical music.
He unfortunately passed away in 2020 and this is the last piece of this selection: it is a noisy proof that Vũ Nhật Tân was not afraid to challenge his audience. I hope he will be remembered for ever.