Elsa Justel
L’Ombre Du Pont
CANADA empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24193 CD (2024)
Third collection of music on this label from this Argentinean composer, following on from 2019’s Yegi, and this one surveys her works from 1995 up to 2020. Although she began her studies in Rosario and Buenos Aires, she also served her time in France with Horacio Vaggione in 1988, and had a teaching role there (as well as academies in her home country and in Spain).
Many of these eleven compositions are tributes or “hommages” to some of the big Kahunas in this field – perhaps they are personal friends, or have acted as mentors to Justel – including Bayle, Parmegiani, Ferreyra, Ferrari, and other names such as Gonzalo Biffarella and Annette Vande Gorne. It’s good to see this personal and friendly dimension, reaching out to her fellow composers instead of seeing them as competitors, and the listener will be glad to hear she’s not producing pastiches or slavish copies of their techniques. Indeed one of the pieces ‘Dialogo con Ana’ is explicitly structured as a musical conversation, produced by swapping tape recordings with the improvising pianist Ana Foutel. Elsewhere, we see evidence of more familiar concerns that thrive in this genre, such as taking the listener into “virtual and imaginary worlds”, and reworking tapes from the archives of GMEB and GES Vierzon in France.
Elsa Justel may, for me, lean a little too heavily on the formal practices and techniques of tape composition, but who can resist a composer who describes one of her earliest pieces as “brown and liquid like tea”, a 10-minute piece full of “blurry” and “dripping” textures. Such phrases have an immediacy and idiosyncrasy that is just priceless. From 01/11/2024.