Electro-Acoustic

Four beautiful works that integrate traditional instruments with tasteful, poetic electronic sound. Electro-Acoustic Santur (1989) is a poetic composition in three parts for two santurs (ancient Persian string instruments with 72 strings, four per note, played with sticks, a brush, and plucked with fingers), four micro-processors, and electronic sounds, played by the composer and interpreter Kyomars Peergalou. The first part is performed with deep bass drone and has a very ancient and modern feeling at the same time; the second part changes the drone to voice-like sounds and adds white noise "hissing," which might suggest desert heat or snakes; the third part adds birdlike electronic sounds. "Guitarra Cubana" (1988), with guitarist Miguel Bonachea, is a composition in three parts for guitar with "preparations" and played in unusual ways (on the body of the instrument, with the little hammers of the santur, scratched, and so on), and phonetics sounds modified by electronics. The result is a highly evocative and quietly emotional non-narrative work. "Inflexiones Vocales" (1982), performed here by soprano Françoise Vanhecke, is a peacefully meditative work for voice and a tape of electronics (bell-like sounds, modified wind, and birdlike calls and sounds of a vocal nature). The concluding composition is "Le Rêveur au Sourire Passager" (1977), for reciter (Jean-Claude Frison) and electronics (a beautiful Harmonizer choir sound, the gated and delayed voice of the reciter traced by gated pats of white noise, and other sounds), and sets a poem that "describes a dark, vast world, incomprehensible and mysterious." ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi