Beatriz Ferreyra’s work has found constrained dissemination compared to many other GRM alumni, only a handful of releases emerging in over 50 years of work. ‘Echos’ follows Room40’s Lawrence English performing with Ferreyra in Portugal and Brazil, as well as bringing her to perform in Australia in 2018, and is a significant addition to the Argentinian’s body of recorded work.
The title-track of ‘Echos +’ is a montage of looped, spliced and layered a capella vocals to four Latin-American songs, the focus on audible tape manipulation rather than any greater performer input or manipulation. Ideas are looped, cadences are ruined, and fragments multiplied across the eight and a half minutes of the piece, but the focus wears a little thin. Created in 1978 “Echos” is somehow the most familiar piece of the LP, its editing and layering reflective of the roots of electroacoustic music as no doubt linked to Ferreyra’s tenure at GRM, albeit but with a personal focus linked to the vocal performances which I find somewhat limiting in impact. As an exercise in technique the piece is clever, but I find its listenability more difficult.
“L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” (“The “Double” Or The Swamp’s”) is again derived from vocal performances, but with a performer input far more marked than the lighter touch of “Echos”. Elongated tones are seemingly constructed from teasingly slowed vocal notes, and create an immediate menace to the piece; “L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” frequently returns to the familiarity of those billowing stretches as a kind of comfort creation, but it’s its need to find that comfort which makes the piece special. Repeated sharp syllabic jabs and wilder yowled, yelled and yelped fragments – verging at its peak in near-riotous climax – lift the piece out of any languorous want, fiercely colouring the piece like blood spatter on snow. The breaths, tics and murmurs which skirted the edges of “Echos” are on this second piece part of a arsenal of honed, bright lashings, vivid punctures of sound which flash across the dark stretches of the piece: the “double” which the title speaks of, and which the liner notes describe as a paradoxal personality, split between vibrant colour and the dark subject of matter of Cendrars’ ‘Moravagine’ in a complex convergence of tonality, texture and dynamic impact.
The centrepiece of ‘Echos +’ is 2007 composition “L’Autre Rive” (“The Other Shore”) which assumes the entire B side, a haunting piece utilising percussion and additional electroacoustic sound. The sound manipulation is more integrative than the first side, the percussion performance itself – such as the timpani swells which alchemise into circularities of sound, its tom rolls which billow reverbed smoke and a comet’s tail of electronics dust, a jazz cymbal riff swallowed by delay, and gong or cymbal scrapings which are stuttered and manipulated more into animal cries than any instrumental output – immersed in technique, and finessed with additional sound inputs.
The piece itself, inspired by the Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), merges those percussive shocks with dark swathes of largely ambient sound for a genuinely haunting affect making full use of the composed sounds and the spaces between them. The first half of the piece is littered with emergent scares of sparse percussion and sympathetically minimalist treatments, a more dominant sound input from Beatriz emerging moreso over the second tranche of the piece, which is in part led by set pieces of shock which are provoked by volume-driven swells of semi-orchestral noise or aeoliphone-type disturbance, and which rise up in volume and intensity as if reaching a skeletal arm at an unsuspecting passer-by. Beatriz’s heavier sound elements seem to include instrumental off-cuts, voice, reverb-heavy synthesis and even some jarring junk percussion-type elements played against Richard Aratian’s percussion performance, the electroacoustic elements initially structured around the percussive sparks before seeming to switch into a primary role over the later half of the piece. It’s an immersive, unpredictable and somehow darkly humourous piece which stands up to repeat listens – it’s had a lot here since ‘Echos +’ arrived – easily, never failing to engage, surprise and delight.
Moving on from the perhaps timid approach of its title track, ‘Echos +’ is electroacoustic music in full flight, constantly blurring the line between acoustic and imagined, between treatment and creation, and between Beatriz herself as performer and those whose creativity births her works. While distanced from modern experimental music in its genesis, the imprint of Ferreyra’s work is found in contemporary realisations of dark ambient and Dadaist sound creation, and is an excellent introduction for those genre dwellers who have yet to explore historical/academic works with a similar inclination.
https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/echos
The title-track of ‘Echos +’ is a montage of looped, spliced and layered a capella vocals to four Latin-American songs, the focus on audible tape manipulation rather than any greater performer input or manipulation. Ideas are looped, cadences are ruined, and fragments multiplied across the eight and a half minutes of the piece, but the focus wears a little thin. Created in 1978 “Echos” is somehow the most familiar piece of the LP, its editing and layering reflective of the roots of electroacoustic music as no doubt linked to Ferreyra’s tenure at GRM, albeit but with a personal focus linked to the vocal performances which I find somewhat limiting in impact. As an exercise in technique the piece is clever, but I find its listenability more difficult.
“L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” (“The “Double” Or The Swamp’s”) is again derived from vocal performances, but with a performer input far more marked than the lighter touch of “Echos”. Elongated tones are seemingly constructed from teasingly slowed vocal notes, and create an immediate menace to the piece; “L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” frequently returns to the familiarity of those billowing stretches as a kind of comfort creation, but it’s its need to find that comfort which makes the piece special. Repeated sharp syllabic jabs and wilder yowled, yelled and yelped fragments – verging at its peak in near-riotous climax – lift the piece out of any languorous want, fiercely colouring the piece like blood spatter on snow. The breaths, tics and murmurs which skirted the edges of “Echos” are on this second piece part of a arsenal of honed, bright lashings, vivid punctures of sound which flash across the dark stretches of the piece: the “double” which the title speaks of, and which the liner notes describe as a paradoxal personality, split between vibrant colour and the dark subject of matter of Cendrars’ ‘Moravagine’ in a complex convergence of tonality, texture and dynamic impact.
The centrepiece of ‘Echos +’ is 2007 composition “L’Autre Rive” (“The Other Shore”) which assumes the entire B side, a haunting piece utilising percussion and additional electroacoustic sound. The sound manipulation is more integrative than the first side, the percussion performance itself – such as the timpani swells which alchemise into circularities of sound, its tom rolls which billow reverbed smoke and a comet’s tail of electronics dust, a jazz cymbal riff swallowed by delay, and gong or cymbal scrapings which are stuttered and manipulated more into animal cries than any instrumental output – immersed in technique, and finessed with additional sound inputs.
The piece itself, inspired by the Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), merges those percussive shocks with dark swathes of largely ambient sound for a genuinely haunting affect making full use of the composed sounds and the spaces between them. The first half of the piece is littered with emergent scares of sparse percussion and sympathetically minimalist treatments, a more dominant sound input from Beatriz emerging moreso over the second tranche of the piece, which is in part led by set pieces of shock which are provoked by volume-driven swells of semi-orchestral noise or aeoliphone-type disturbance, and which rise up in volume and intensity as if reaching a skeletal arm at an unsuspecting passer-by. Beatriz’s heavier sound elements seem to include instrumental off-cuts, voice, reverb-heavy synthesis and even some jarring junk percussion-type elements played against Richard Aratian’s percussion performance, the electroacoustic elements initially structured around the percussive sparks before seeming to switch into a primary role over the later half of the piece. It’s an immersive, unpredictable and somehow darkly humourous piece which stands up to repeat listens – it’s had a lot here since ‘Echos +’ arrived – easily, never failing to engage, surprise and delight.
Moving on from the perhaps timid approach of its title track, ‘Echos +’ is electroacoustic music in full flight, constantly blurring the line between acoustic and imagined, between treatment and creation, and between Beatriz herself as performer and those whose creativity births her works. While distanced from modern experimental music in its genesis, the imprint of Ferreyra’s work is found in contemporary realisations of dark ambient and Dadaist sound creation, and is an excellent introduction for those genre dwellers who have yet to explore historical/academic works with a similar inclination.
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