In the midst of the many deserving reissues in the realm of experimental music (just look at the volumes of Roland Kayn albums to resurface on Bandcamp this year), it’s interesting to step back and recall that many of the 20th-Century avant garde wrote their music as scores, rather than assembling definitive studio versions. As such, it’s nice to see modern musicians take their stabs at some of these classic pieces. Nicolas Bernier’s Ensemble d’Oscillateurs provide a lovely look at two pieces from Pauline Oliveros and Elsa Marie Pade, both performed using test oscillators and other crude physics equipment (see Berna 3 for a similar experience on your computer).
As a bonus, there’s a book – including scores – that dives into the whole process. And you owe it to yourself to learn about this one.
—cdm.link
The posthumous acknowledgement of the groundbreaking work of Pauline Oliveros continues to run at full speed even five years after the death of the deep listening pioneer, mostly thanks to the US-based label Important Records. The situation is different in the case of the Danish composer Else Marie Pade, who died only a few months before Oliveros, which is why the release of interpretations of Oliveros’s »Jar Piece« and Pade’s »Faust« by the Ensemble d’oscillateurs, founded by sound artist Nicolas Bernier, comes just in time. The pieces on 2 Transcriptions (Oliveros • Pade), each recorded with ten oscillators, are accompanied by a digital book containing not only the ensemble scores but also texts by Bernier as well as Guillaume Boutard and Caroline Traube. A comprehensive, beautiful tribute to two exceptional, visionary minds.
—field-notes.berlin
Canadian ten-piece synth troupe Ensemble D’Oscillateurs show off their skills on this meticulous re-interpretation of an excerpt of Pauline Oliveros’s 1966 ‘Jar Piece’ and five movements of Else Marie Pade’s 1962 masterwork “Faust”.
While the ensemble – founded in 2016 by Nicolas Bernier – focused on new compositions on their LINE debut, 2018’s “4 compositions”, “2 Transcriptions” is a more complicated process. Bernier was tasked with transcribing and interpreting Oliveros and Pade’s pieces with help from Estelle Schorpp. The release comes bundled with a digital book that details the process and shows the scores (with additional text from digital preservation researcher Guillaume Boutard and acoustic researcher Caroline Traube), and may help curious synth fetishists employ similar techniques.
The music itself is quite remarkable in its recreation of the established works. Each musician uses old analogue oscillators which generate sine wave tones with two basic parameters: frequency and amplitude. These sounds are similar to those that Oliveros and Pade were employing in the 1960s, so come close to replicating the originals. But since these are new recordings, made with the benefit of contemporary technology, there’s a dynamic depth that adds all-important space and precision to the sounds.
—boomkat.com
While I’m confessing here, I’ll add that as much as I liked 4 compositions at the time of its release three years ago, I wasn’t directing any speculative thought toward a follow-up. The work presented had managed to fulfill any unforeseen longings I’d had for oscillator-generated music. So imagine my surprise when I heard Ensemble d’oscillateurs’ 2 Transcriptions (Oliveros + Pade).
Accompanying this new recording is an extensive, bilingual booklet describing the mind-melting work that went into transcribing the works, “Jar Piece (a Piece of)” by composer and founder of the original Deep Listening Institute, Pauline Oliveros, and “Faust” by electronic and musique concrète composer Else Marie Pade. The trope “labor of love” does little justice to the challenges Bernier and company faced to bring new life to these works. After listening to what they’ve achieved, I can say without hesitation that it’s a huge accomplishment.
Something these new recordings have going for them, compared with the tracks on 4 compositions, is brevity. “Jar Piece” takes off with what sounds like squalling feedback before climbing to the upper registers where it hangs in suspended tones, mobile and free as a hawk riding thermals. Those elongated tones gradually break up into arrhythmic fragments punctuated by swoops and glides while still maintaining their purchase on that upper realm. As the piece begins drawing toward its close, a high steady ringing emerges and stabilizes, pulling a few straggling tones in line with it while others fade to nothing, creating a solid yet airy sense of closure in its wake. In the six short minutes it takes for “Jar Piece” to play out, it artfully wields a laser to your skull and opens your mind to the sun.
The first movement of “Faust” had me convinced that someone was accompanying the ensemble on keys. This is easily the most melodic the ensemble has sounded so far and that sense of melody continues throughout as it sharpens and fuzzes and glints. A genuinely eerie mood is conjured in the second movement with its theremin-esque tones and timbre and the spreading haze of static that subtly drifts in and overlaps. Where Oliveros’ track feels elevated and Apollonian, Pade’s feels mired and earthbound, interior in comparison, like a kind of psychological soundtrack for a displaced person. The third movement is perhaps my favorite: spare, tentative, and gently pulsing with undesignated worry. Unexpectedly, Movement 5 drops the listener on a windswept shore and buffets them with bracing squalls of static before filling that new headspace with a chorus of what sound like crickets overlayed with rumbling growls and almost at times like someone violently bowing a cello. “Faust” wraps up with a recapitulation of theme and mood and texture, a brief, creepy, narcotized crawl to something more of an ending than a clear-cut finish. It leaves a spooky residue behind it.
2 Transcriptions make it clear that the skills and techniques of the ensemble have grown exponentially in the time between recording their first album and this one. To listen to it and consider that the impressive arrays of sounds produced are coming only from sine waves makes me want to run out and snap up the nearest oscillator I can find just to see what else it can do.
Sometimes you don’t know what you need until somebody shows you. If I’ve done my job properly, you might just need this music too.
—anothergreenkitchen.com
