Manuella Blackburn
Interruptions
CANADA empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24194 CD (2024)
Another strong release from this gifted English electro-acoustic composer, whose discography to date shows the clarity of her ideas, each composition focused on one object or concept at a time, and seeing through the plan to completion. She’s also unafraid of telling stories, a rare thing in this genre.
On this survey of recent pieces (2018 to 2023) I somehow detect a very “modern” sound, made by a creator informed by glitch, techno, ambient and related developments in our field since around 1999 onwards. The “interruptions” of the title manifest themselves as micro-edits and dramatic timbral shifts, making each track an excitement of fizz and texture. There’s also plenty of interruptions on the opener ‘Home Truths’, which expresses her own exasperation at trying to get things done at home, without being continually distracted. It may start out as a sonic treatise on domestic objects, but the abstractions of the piece successfully delineate a restless mind and the way that her thought processes work. ‘Microplastics’ doesn’t have quite the same urgency as that powerful visualisation, but it has an ecological message – it started life as a search for plastic bottles as a sound source and soon became a critique of the “colossal mountains of rubbish” we’re producing in our consumerist society.
After those two well-informed observations, ‘Farewell Fairlight’ arrives as a more benign centrepiece to the album; well, she got her hands on a Fairlight machine, the sampling keyboard so beloved of Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Trevor Horn and many others, and uses it to create something wholly unexpected. She did use some of the pre-loaded sounds on the floppy disc, but created her own samples of sounds produced by some of the machine’s internal mechanisms – e.g. powering it up, the light pen touching the screen, even the sound of the fans. Events not reckoned as music or even desirable artefacts of the Fairlight. Yet from her notes, it’s clear she knows more about 1980s pop production than the entire staff of BBC Radio One, and it’s both ingenious and entertaining how she’s spliced all this knowledge and innovative sampling methods together with the strictures of formal musique concrète composition. Top marks for this layered and wonderful rainbow symphony which dazzles and brings joy in less than 13 mins.
Also here, ‘Cupboard Love’, a virtual exploration of her own mental memory as manifested in wooden cabinets full of photos and papers; and ‘Landline’, based on happy memories of an old dial phone from her family home. You can probably guess at the audio texture of this telephone piece, but it’s still a delight and far from clichéd. If there’s a pattern running through these five selections, it’s as much to do with her own personal exploration of her past, as well as devising and applying compositional methods that are entirely aligned with the objects at the centre, in a very sympathetic manner. Besides being full of creative energy, Manuella Blackburn is one of the more altruistic and accessible composers on this label. (01/11/2024)