Pierre Henry is a French composer who is widely known as one of the two godfathers of Musique Concrete. The other one is Pierre Schaeffer. Musique Concrete is based on acousmatic sound ideology which is listenin to a sound without knowing/seeing the source. Of course this is too much of a blurry explanation. The sources of sounds in Musique Concrete are mainly electronic sounds and samples, tape recordings. There are not any human or instrumental sounds in it (Minor exceptions may occur). However, later on Ilhan Mimaroglu combined poems with Musique Concrete. Musique Concrete lies within the general genre of Electroacoustic Music.
Both of the works were on this LP have been recorded between 1960 and 1962 while there has been a delay in releasing the record. I don't know why this delay occured, but it has been released by Philips under their prestigious series Prospective 21e Siecle. This series have been home to very important Musique Concrete and Contemporary Classical Music with Pierre Henry and Iannis Xenakis taking most of the applause.
Henry's work "La Noire A Soixante" is a little different than most of the other Musique Concrete works I've listened until now. The main point is silence is an important aspect of the piece with samples flowing under irregular cycles with changing frequencies and timbres. There is also a tape recording played backwards which is used a lot in this style of music.
The B side is "La Noire À Soixante + Granulométrie" which is essentially the A side being re-recorded while superimposing "Granulometrie" into it. The voice being heard (As I said minor exceptions) is François Dufrêne and the piece is about the experiments on his voice. Due to a more detailed structure on this re-recorded version, silences are more scarce with constant samples flowing around. Even though the A side version suits my minimalistic tastes more, the B side is more fulfilling the notion of Musique Concrete.
To buy this record:
@ Discogs
@ Ebay
No comments:
Post a Comment