Arcane Candy

Along with the François Bayle and Ivo Malec 2-CD sets, The Violostries… 2-CD is one of the major continents on the INA-GRM planet and is a required layover for any wayward electro-acoustic music fan. These two discs divide his career into two eras: tape splicing and mouse clicking. “Violostries” (1963) is comprised of a sustained, ominous atmosphere punctuated with violent electro bursts and spooky, tweedling violin. “Pour en Finir Avec le Pouvoir d’Orphée” (1971) is a very mesmerizing pleasure fun center full of glimmering electronics building in intensity—only to give way to downwardly circling whip-cuts, metallic crashes and echoes of the deepest kind. A very empty area of low pulsations with high-pitched tinklings again amplifies and builds in intensity—eventually turning into a swirling mass of rare beauty that abruptly comes to a sudden, beeping stop. Following that is a rather “happy” section of boinging electronic “springs” and whistles that slowly coalesce with a low-pitched drone into a hectic area of stuttered percussive sounds.

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Bernard Parmegiani has been making stunning electro-acoustic music since 1959. Have you? La Création du Monde (1982-84) is basically the big bang theory of universal origin rendered in sound, divided into three sections. “Black Light” is an atonal, white-noise journey—pre-explosion—as “the dreamer of the world plunges down unendingly into his own depths as he strives toward the point from which he originates. Black light…a fermentation of latent, incommensurable energies with no conscious strategy. The echo within the echo increases space exponentially. Everything is set to begin.”

“Metamorphosis of the Void” opens with a beautiful, spacey feeling of anticipation as “something changes into form, heat, light, movement, anarchic corpuscular vibrations. Everything becomes the ‘energy of existence’”and continues building up colored layers of timbered sounds. “Following this gradual, continual filling of the void, the end of the movement heralds, in a quasi-melodic melopoeia, the signs of light that are the culmination of all these slow, drawn-out transformations.”

“Sign of Life” is, of course, the final section, in which “a planet—our planet—emerges and a ‘life logic’ organizes itself around it. From amoeba to man, everything is obviously a sign of life, the interaction of all the elements of transformation. The sound material becomes more concrète, in other words, it begins to approach what we are able to grasp through auditory recognition.” Finally, at the very end, the quiet sounds of birds, insects and someone walking signal the arrival of a realm familiar to the human listener.

Label: INA-GRM Catalog Number: INA C 1002 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 12 Total Time: 72:58 Country: France Released: 1996 Related Artists: Francois Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Schaeffer More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Official

This is a collaborative 2-CD set with Bernard Parmegiani on one disc and François Bayle on the other. The effort here is to shove Dante’s work into your noggin via electro-acoustic means. Parm’s side is heavily laden with spoken French text (which tends to kind of bum out my day) while Bayle’s is less so. This is the only François Bayle CD I haven’t shelled out for yet, but maybe soon. (Translation: Probably never, as it’s been out of print for many years.)

Label: Magison Cycle Bayle Volume 7 Catalog Number: MG CB 0795 Format: 2-CD Packaging: Double jewel case Tracks: CD 1: 9, CD 2: 11 Total Time: CD 1: 61:20, CD 2: 71:28 Country: France Released: 1995 Related Artists: Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani, Pierre Schaeffer More: Electro CD, Forced Exposure, Official, Wikipedia