australysis
Meaning returns to experimental sounds
Reviewed by Peter McCallum in the Sydney Morning Herald (8 December)
austraLYSIS's customary December concert of new and experimental music featured, among other intreguing pieces, the work of distinguished Canadian electroacoustic composer Robert Normandeau.
Electronic music is sometimes dogged by the boundless possibilities taht ought to be its salvation, so that the music can become a parade of the strange and weird without cultural meaning or resonance.
Normandeau's extended work Malina was marked by simplicity, directness and evocativeness, rejoicing in the subtlety and sophistication of new timbres, while tapping into deep sonic archetypes and speech-like shapes that carry intuitive meaning for any listener.
At one point, superimposed over an imaginative range of gestures, a solemn bell-like sound intruded on the texture, so that without in any sense telling a specific story, one became aware of something premonitory and ominous that would not be silenced.
In Bede, Normandeau created a tapestry of childlike inflection, like a small symphony of infants speaking their own invented language where eveything makes perfect sense except the words. This was music of imaginative suggestiveness, whetting the appetite to explore further Normandeau's considerable recorded catalogue.
Words and their sense was also the subject of Instabilities 2 by Hazel Smith with the austraLYSIS band. Smith had constucted a series of verbal texts-some conversational, some journalistic, some narrative - and these were projected into three windows on a screen.
The first scrolled at readable speed, while the second was fragmented and changed so rapidly that one only caught the odd word or phrase, like a half-remembered quotation or saying.
Joanna Still and Hazel Smith's Clay Conversations with soundscape by austraLYSIS's director, Roger Dean, extended such games to a video format with pictures of Still's ceramics and striking images from her travels in Zambia and Ethiopia.