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OLIVIER ALARY

Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators

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LINE is happy to announce Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators by French composer Olivier Alary. This collection of works comes on the heels of his acclaimed poetic album Fiction / Non-Fiction on 130701 records.

Pieces for Sine Waves Oscillators is the first collection of purely electronic music by musician and composer Olivier Alary. These six tracks explore the melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities of the most rudimentary expression of sound: the sine tone.

In Alary’s hands, these basic, occasionally discordant elements become a soundtrack to feeling and rest, dream and presence—sometimes bell-like, sometimes evoking brass, strings, organs or woodwinds. Using a network of 64 software oscillators,  the composer creates voices, blurring melodies, which drift and intertwine—a post-modern, digital chamber music that also recalls Medieval forms, Renaissance choirs.

Pieces for Sine Waves Oscillators has none of the coldness that characterizes similar work by minimal electronic composers: these gentle, vivid elegies seem to shift and breathe, twisting like aurora, gesturing toward the sacred.

An otherworldly elegant collection of works for those who love Eliane Radigue, Eleh, or Celer.

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Catalog:
LINE_089
Format:
Digital
Edition:
Open Edition
Release:
June 2017
Tracklist:

1. I (10:59)
2. II (11:59)
3. III (12:48)
4. IV (08:34)
5. V (14:38)
6. VI (03:17)

Music composed & produced by Olivier Alary
Mastered by Johannes Malfatti
cover artwork by Daniel Palacios

Thank you: Julían, Karina & the rest of my family, Johannes Malfatti, Pascal Teixeira, Sean Michaels, and Richard Chartier.

 

Download PDF Liner Notes

Olivier Alary is a Montreal-based musician, composer and conductor of noise. “My first musical expression was feedback,” he says; he didn’t stay there. Since the end of the 1990s, Alary has developed a body of work that prowls through the spaces between classical composition and pop immediacy, acoustic and electronic sound, harmony and din.

Born and raised in Toulouse, France, Alary spent his teens making punk music, shouting over detuned guitars. But his musical landscape was overturned with his discovery of the pioneering Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) and their mid-century electronica: noisy, visceral, composed. The musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Bernard Parmegiani began to inform his experiments and soon, self-taught, Alary was recording songs that either blurred old forms or invented new ones.

Alary’s first official release was a 2000 collection of experimental pop, recorded under the name Ensemble, issued by Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. Over the course of two more Ensemble LPs, he collaborated with artists including Cat Power and Lou Barlow; he also began a partnership with Björk, producing several remixes and contributing a song to her 2004 album Medulla.

Since then, Alary has centered his practice on instrumental music – experiments in complexity and form that recall Bang On A Can, Tim Hecker and Jóhann Jóhannson. These pieces blur what is live and what is generated, what is organic and what is artificial: “I like to use techniques that aren’t intended,” he says. “Making acoustic instruments sound brittle, dissolving – or else very steady, like a sequencer. And making electronic instruments sound fragile, vulnerable, human.”

Some of this music is minimalist; other compositions are clamorous, epic, lamenting. Alary’s work underlines the imperfections of its sounds – uses these imperfections as signal, texture. This has led to fine-art collaborations with Nick Knight and Doug Aitken; more recently, Alary has become a sought-after film composer. His soundtracks include Jo pour Jonathan (2010) and Félix & Meira (2014), each of which was put forward as Canada’s official Academy Award submission, and China Heavyweight, one of several projects with director Yung Chang, which was awarded a 2012 Golden Horse – the biggest film prize in the Mandarin-speaking world. A selection of Alary’s film music, Fiction/Non-Fiction, was released by 130701 in 2017.

 

REVIEWS OF
Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators

  • On the occasion of Olivier’s output “Fiction/Non-Fiction” on Fat Cat’s sister label 130701, the Toulouse-born producer told us something about his forthcoming projects (including an attempt of intersecting Lachenmann-like “concrete instrumental music” and post-tonal language developed by many American minimalist composer), but he didn’t tell anything about this release. That’s the reason why I can say it’s a sort of unexpected sonic gift. There’s nothing but sine waves (obviously squeezed by oscillators) as you can easily guess by the title, but the imprint and the sensitivity by Olivier Alary is the really important recipe. You can imagine he took a break, lighted a cigarette up, but just to observe the wreaths of smoke to turn them into sound instead of inhaling them. The way by which he blows the smoky impalpable sine waves out of his oscillators sounds remarkably influenced by the somehow cinematic imprint of Olivier’s sound. The six entrancing pieces placidly enclose listeners into amniotic whispers, that get detached by underlying pure tones to dissolve into the sonic sphere, and fine tonal mists, that could be thought as a minimalist derivation of organ-driven sacred music. Besides a good pair of headphones or a good set of amplifiers, I recommend to enjoy it in the dim lights just before nightfall.
    (chaindlk.com)

  • Fresh from his wide-scoped ‘Fiction / Non Fiction’ side for Fatcat’s 130701 label, Olivier Alary (Ensemble) follows quieter lines of investigation to enchanting, sublime conclusions in his first suite of purely electronic music under his birth name – RIYL Eleh, Eliane Radigue, Kevin Drumm
    (boomkat.com)

  • With Olivier Alary’s “Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators”, California-based label LINE Imprint continues its flow of conceptual and minimalist releases that refuse to draw a line between sound art and music.

    At the heart of the compositions assembled here lies a strictly formalized idea: By only resorting to using sine wave oscillators as sound sources, Alary is creating sound that is only electronically possible.
    Sine waves are pure frequencies with no overtones or harmonics; they are found nowhere in nature. And more often than not, digital music is being described in ways that only describe an absence. Often accused of lacking what has become known as ‘analogue warmth’, it is being called cold, inhuman, or alien. Alary sees this as an opportunity to use electronic means to reach the other end of the spectrum, shaping digital sound into an offering that is warm, human, and relatable. We accept it immediately. These recordings speak very directly to us. They are an intimate experience.

    As can be discerned from the title, the album has no reference points beyond its rigidly technical concept. And the pieces assembled here are all uniform exercises of the same basic principle: Tones gently fade in and out of, and dissolve into each other, with no discernible starting or ending points.

    This creates a floating, otherworldly experience that stays with the listener long after the music has ended. While nothing repeats, everything here is a variation of itself. The pieces do not develop in a classical sense, rather, they are moving in spirals and circles, ebbing and flowing. They oscillate. In fact, there are no contrasts in this music – it is pure motion. The real task with this approach is to prevent a deterioration into a shapeless mess. Alary masters this problem by carefully balancing out all elements at all times.

    These “Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators” are sparse, but not timid, gently convincing the listener without any pressure or force. They are reminiscent of the compositions of Éliane Radigue: Both are having a highly sensitizing effect on the listener. Clearly, this is the work of a mature and confident composer who knows exactly what they are doing. You will not want to listen to anything else afterwards.
    (passiveagggressive.dk)