Yannis Kyriakides
Resorts & Ruins
UNSOUNDS 33u CD (2013)

Moving on from his sonic renderings of geographical contours, the Projector-approved ‘Cypriot genius’ Yanni Kyriakides treats us to a new form of psychogeographic meditation in Resorts & Ruins: one concerned with the long-term effects of erosion on locales physical and mnemonic. He relates these themes by means of juxtaposition: impersonal expanses of electroacoustic dark matter colliding with warm fragments of traditional music sampled from different vocal traditions including Turkish pop, Cypriot epic song, and opera. These add both a serendipitous ‘Sublime Frequencies’ air to the listening experience, while suggesting the irrepressibility of half-remembered events. By such means, Kyriakides provides an entrancing alternative history lesson: one poised perfectly between intellect and artistry; ambitious enough to render me regretful of doodling my way through the years of my school education.

Erosion as a consequence of neglect comprises the central concern in ‘Varosha (Disco Debris)’; pretty much the album’s sonic centrepiece, in which the above song forms erupt at inopportune moments during robotic tour-guide narration. This infuses and alternates with an expanding and unstable metallic background, which spans the half-hour duration and provides uncomfortable reminder of the indelibility of past traumas, whether personal or historical. Events centre on the eponymous Varosha – a Cypriot ‘ghost town’ – invaded by Turkish forces in July 1974 and maintained as a fenced-off ‘political bargaining chip’ ever since. The contrast between approachable samples and lunar dispassion evokes an idyllic summer rendered memorable for the wrong reasons. As it happens, the summer in question constitutes Kyriakides’ earliest memory: he holidayed at the location with his family when the Turkish invasion occurred, and spent a memorable day in a hotel basement, drawing on the floor: perhaps the floor plan for the present work?

More illustrious associations are invoked in ‘The 100 Words’: a composition of ‘synthesized voices and electronic sound’, commissioned and created at the GRM studios in Paris, performed at the Presence Electronique festival in 2012, and enjoyed by me in my living room. I must say, the reverberating sub-bass that emboldens fragmented instructions to ‘look’ and eventually ‘speak’ is shoving my eardrums dangerously close together – a suffering I heartily recommend to fellow audio masochists. It is accompanied by further samples; these taken from an obsolescent form of song traditionally sung at Cypriot weddings, which relates the sense of destiny that has drawn the betrothed couple together since birth. Simultaneously disintegrating while throbbing with greater and greater intensity, revealing greater detail in each sweep, the piece gains magnificent momentum over its 21-minute lifespan, as the components are revised and intermeshed. GRM certainly got their money’s worth!

Dividing the above, extended compositions in searing slices of sound are the three ‘Covertures’, which tweak a similar set of variables each round. Here too narrates the dispassionate voice of officialdom, commanding a process thus: ‘open [ rising drone ] ‘close’ [ silence ] ‘open’ [ drone ] ‘close’ [ silence ] ‘open’ [ drone ] ‘close’ [ silence ] and so on – in the first section at least. Said drones offer fearsome, galactic ringing that should not fail to facilitate listener concentration. Kyriakides describes these ‘walls’ as ‘frozen instants’ captured in the opening and closing sections of a performance of a Monteverdi opera. Beneath the glassy blasts one can easily discern the raucous sounds of an energetic crowd, though whether it expresses violence or appreciation constitutes and ambiguity that confers on the piece a powerful reminder of how the value of a cultural experience can easily be determined by factors outside of the performer’s intention. How many gigs have been made or marred by an audience, one might ask. It also brings to mind an account given by Genesis P. Orridge of a ploy used by William Burroughs to take revenge on a Greek-owned café in London, where he had been slighted by an insolent waiter. Slinking back and forward, past the establishment, Burroughs spent time airing tape recordings of riots so as to establish an air of disquiet. This he followed up by taking a photograph of the area and splicing together two sections of the street sans café. Apparently the café went out of business soon afterwards and the space proved poison for anyone trying to set up shop thereafter. Beats firebombing I suppose. Anyway, these pieces were developed from a series of ‘sound walls’ used in an installation for a collective exhibition entitled ‘Opera Aperta’, held at the Dutch Pavilion, Venice, in 2011. Kyriakides has evidently rather careful in his section selection, as the sound is ever captivating.

I’ve a well-developed soft spot for electroacoustic music such as this, which is perhaps why I cannot find any words of criticism for it, as it satisfies intellectually, emotionally and as a self-contained listening experience. Thus it receives a glowing thumbs-up from me. The CD is accompanied by a set of saturated colour postcards of Cypriot locations entitled “The Golden Seaside”. Based on based on images of Varosha, the cards offer a vivid, hyperrealist counterpoint to the faded photograph aesthetic of Fennesz’ ‘Endless Summer’, while remaining consistent with the concepts explored within Kyriakides’ fascinating music.

Manuella Blackburn
Formes Audibles
empreintes DIGITALes IMED 12117 DVD (2012)

If ever there were just cause not to judge a book (or CD) by its cover then this is it. The sleeve’s hazy smudge of tame blue and yellow is more indicative of a Rothko-esque William Basinski rip-off than an ontologically expansive, electroacoustic orgy. Look more closely though and a telling detail reveals that this is another CD on the redoubtable empreintes DIGITALes label, whose bold claim to be ‘the world leader in electroacoustic/acousmatics’ will solidly stand-up to any bench test. In fact, given the daring new vocabularies voiced on recordings such as this, the debut from the UK’s Manuella Blackburn, I’m visited by an overpowering sense that I am the one being tested.

One need only glance at Blackburn’s biography to be dazzled: barely in her thirties, she is a lecturer in Music Technology at Manchester University and has already taken home a slew of illustrious awards from international electronic music events. However, venture into the music and you will find yourself lost for words. INA GRM fiends may find themselves at home amidst this spellbinding selection of surgically sculpted, swiftly shifting sounds and tunneling tones, cosmic flourishes and vacuumed hushes; all emulsified by a convulsive cohesiveness that obviates any hint of homogeneity, while marking every tone as Blackburn’s own. However, for other listeners it may be like ‘spherical trigonometry for the inhabitants of Flatland’, as Aleister Crowley put it.

Track titles range from the open-ended (‘Switched On’, ‘Vista Points’, ‘Kitchen Alchemy’ and ‘Spectral Spaces’) to those of a more orientalist ambiguity (‘Karita Oto’ and ‘Cajon!’). More than merely cursory designations, they successfully signpost the strange realms of sonic mysteries (to be) traversed not just by the listener, but the composer as well. Blackburn has personally articulated the discovery process by which she arrived at certain source sounds, before proceeding with an exploratory process of creating cohesive (if temperamental) compositions. The latter titles – more exotic designations – depict encounters between origins foreign and familiar perhaps found during the composer’s travels, as does the use of a French title for the collection.

These six compositions were realised between 2007 and 2011. All throughout, sound sources from guitar to household appliances are rubbled to clouds of recognisable remnants that are animated into play perhaps best viewed in infrared, as they are climatologically morphed in a febrile, fluctuating maelstrom. Some of the recurring ‘audible forms’ include pointillistic flutters in particle accelerators, powdered performance samples draped over air currents, punctuated by split-second stabs of alien alloys, plunged into low-density liquids, and tucked into electro-gossamer sheets of pure tone. Fans of Bernard Parmegiani or Francis Dhomont may find themselves on familiar ground, but will equally be delighted at so fresh and authentic a manner of articulation.

In ‘Vista Points’, flurries of improvised guitar are fleshed out, strings amplified to an almost glassy pitch, and spray-painted with myriad layers of twittering designer genes. The resulting ‘causality, conflict and turbulence’ is captivating, especially so in the sudden moments, when the piece’s initial stability yields to a terrible tension between explosive pressure and release/tentative stillness and paralysing presence, and the atmosphere is engorged with crackling clouds of electrons.

The sound source in ‘Switched On’ is an aged television, from the wake-up stage of which the composer has coaxed unfamiliar flutters and frequencies – some just a split second in duration – and painstakingly corralled them into a towering cake of ‘cascades and explosive flourishes’. The realised piece – a polyphony between chimes and switches in alternating on/off states of animation – surges with the electrical life force of a seemingly dormant device, which depiction succinctly epitomises much of Blackburn’s composition: originating in a static state, suddenly seething violently but with volition and direction seemingly more evolved than the sensory apparatus of the listener.

‘Karita Oto’ (‘borrowed sound’) derives equally from a number of traditional Japanese instruments (the samples were taken during a 2008 trip to Tokyo), and ‘compositional strategies developed from Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology’. The piece follows an ‘episodic structure’ through which ‘cultural’ sounds are deconstructed to their very DNA, and reformed into glistening web ladders thumped and plucked by monstrous spider appendages. The duality that informs this composition of contrasts is, according to Blackburn, inspired by the oft-remarked upon extremes found in Japanese culture, such as one might find during a daytrip around the Zen temples of central Kyoto.

The immediate and relentless ‘Kitchen Alchemy’ careens like carnal relations between mercurial bodies as if heard from within: an amorphous, unstable globule of rippling liquid metal spitting out bulbous bursts of machine-whir with undertones of deep gong resonance. Like ‘Karita Oto’, the piece’s acousmatic exegesis of kitchen utensils is realised via Denis Smalley’s spectromorphological language and ‘structures created from a variety of onset, continuant, and termination vocabulary combinations’, which certainly bears out the eponymous alchemist’s jargon-heavy patois. And while some might regard the invocation of alchemy qua compositional paradigm as clichéd, then the composer’s application of esoteric and individualised processes to the end of elevating base matter into something precious certainly offers some justification.

‘Cajón!’, which utilises recordings of the eponymous Peruvian percussion instrument, kicks into gear with superhumanly swift, scattershot rhythms that descend and depart with bewildering frequency, mutating in form and volume with each pass, as though having gained self-awareness and attempting to escape through the speakers. And, even as the atmosphere is slowly divested of its density, a feast of flamenco handclaps, metallic clicks and scrapes are masticated with similar gusto.

‘Spectral Spaces’ surveys a radiant vista of modulating twitter with violently tugging riptides, as thought the shimmering sound of light itself had been liquefied and amplified atom by agitated atom. Consisting of four ‘passages of concentration, crossover, overlap, and interstices’ divided by slices of silence, the piece touches upon a simpler, but no less extreme audio range than the other pieces, seemingly desirous to return to the shimmering state of grace in which it opens.

Interviewed in Bananafish magazine (issue 15), Romanian composer Ana-Maria Avram articulated her compositional challenge as ‘to build the whole from almost nothing, from fewer and fewer things…’ The same could be said to apply to electroacoustic music in general, but Blackburn’s compositions provide perfect exemplification. Her exacting approach to the arrangement of elements – often microscopic in size – facilitates the formation of an alien syntax from phonemes familiar. These six pieces are as hypnotising in their brief moments of luxuriance as in their explosions of visceral morphology, and will yield their manifold mysteries for much time to come. By the same token, unless the listener is particularly masochistic, these pieces are probably best digested at the very gradual pace at which they are NOT delivered, so I would caution listeners to ‘chew slowly’. Speaking as an armchair enthusiast though, I cannot overstate just how exciting and refreshing this music is.