Luc Ferrari Albums (10)
What The Critics Say
This album is the last part of a triptych that had been planned while Luc Ferrari was still alive. In fact, the first volume, Les Anecdotiques (a hörspiel) was released before his death; then came Son Mémorisé (a collection of electro-acoustic works) and finally Didascalies. The latter is devoted to Ferrari's instrumental music and culls two recent works ("Rencontres Fortuites" and "Didascalies") and an older piece recently re-executed ("Tautologos III"). The first two are written for piano, viola, and "memorized sounds" (i.e., tape) and were composed specifically for Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven and Vincent Royer, while the last piece is an open-ended work with unspecified instrumentation, here performed by the same two musicians. The whole album was recorded only weeks before Luc Ferrari's death in August of 2005. That sad note aside, Didascalies is a very strong album, possibly the best recording of any of the composer's instrumental works. "Rencontres Fortuites" (23 minutes) is actually a suite of eight sequences defined by unrelated tape parts -- and some very odd ones at that: a woman sighing under Ferrari's meticulous directions, models recorded in a dressing room, and other improbable settings. Collard-Neven and Royer weave an unstable dialogue through these memorized sounds, creating awkward moods. The piece is certainly interesting and puzzling, but it does not engage the listener as strongly as "Didascalies" (21 minutes) does. That piece is pure Ferrari genius: each musician selects a motive and sticks to it, transforming it in reaction to the other musician's motive and to "stage directions" (the translation for the French word "didascalies"), while a tape part (again typically Ferrari-esque: both evocative and anecdotal) is superimposed on the result. Collard-Neven and Royer quickly give the piece a yearning, melodramatic atmosphere, filled with tension and just a bit of that over-exaggeration that was Ferrari's form of humor. "Tautologos III" uses a similar device, i.e. repetitive motives attracting each other over time, although what drives this particular piece is accretion. If the compositional devices (and tape parts) are occasionally mechanical in nature, the execution is never cold, breathing a lot of humanity into these unusual constructs. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide
'Far-West News (Episodes 2 & 3)'
Release Date 9/19/2006
Tracks 11
Label Blue Chopsticks
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What The Critics Say
Luc Ferrari's annotation to this CD doesn't make the circumstances surrounding this recording totally clear, but basically, the sounds comprising these two nearly half-hour-long compositions were recorded during a trip across the American Southwest in September 1998. Although just two "tracks" ("Far-West News Episode 2" and "Far-West News Episode 3") are listed on the sleeve, in fact the disc itself is divided into ten separate selections. ("Episode 1" from this journey appears on a different CD release.) The core of these recordings presents speech-oriented audio snippets collected during these travels -- conversations with acquaintances, stops at restaurants and shops, inquiries for directions, tacky Hollywood tours, and so forth. Overlaid and mixed in with these are tapes of onrushing/passing automobiles, airplanes flying overhead, minimal electronic tones, disquieting reverberations, and what sound like brief distorted tumbles of synthetic percussion. These juxtapositions reflect the randomness and, yes, mundaneness of these kind of wanderings, where tense intrusions from civilization are never far away, but unexpected kindnesses from strangers help keep you on the road. It doesn't really lead anywhere exciting or conclusive, but then, that's how much of real life goes. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Son Memorise (Memorized Sound) is the second installment in a three-volume series put together by the Sub Rosa label and Luc Ferrari before the latter died. This album focuses on the composer's musique concrète and presents three previously unreleased works: the final "Presque Rien," an old piece, and a very recent one. "Presque Rien #4" takes us on a walk through a village, although this is not your average soundwalk. Reality is being shaped as Ferrari sticks his microphone left and right (he once said that the act of recording was a form of composition in itself), and being reshaped in the studio afterwards, with snippets of dialogue being used as leitmotivs and abstract sonic material highlighting the "real" events. The piece shows once again how agile Ferrari could be with field recordings as he reinvents them from top to bottom. The title of the 1978 piece "Promenade Symphonique dans un Paysage Musical ou un Jour de Fête à El-Oued, 1976" means "symphonic walk through a soundscape on a festive day in El Oued, 1976." The field recordings serving as the basis for this half-hour long work were made in Algeria. Ferrari takes his microphone through the desert, to a city where people start singing at the sight of it. The composer walks straight into a wedding and there, the celebrations escalate into music, dance, and gunfire. All the action is carefully structured, to a point where, again, notions of reality and fiction intermingle. However, the middle sections are somewhat long, and the sense of displacement does not last. Much better is "Saliceburry Cocktail," an abstract electro-acoustic piece completed in 2002. No field recordings, no narrative, only a complex game of hide and seek between natural sounds and their multiple transformations. Highly dynamic and intense, this 30-minute work is an essential for musique concrète connoisseurs: as dramatic and absorbing as Francis Dhomont's best works, more immediate and emotional than Pierre Henry's, it is alone worth the price of this album. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide
'Les Anecdotiques: Exploitation de Concepts No. 6'
Release Date 5/25/2004
Tracks 15
Label Sub Rosa
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What The Critics Say
It would be useless to attempt to find a form of narrative in Les Anecdotiques. Luc Ferrari's objective was to create a continuous piece that gave the impression of telling a story, yet consists only of several intermingling anecdotes -- thus the title, "The Anecdotals." The result is simply stunning. This hour-long sound collage borrows from electro-acoustics and phonography, blending recordings on location (although the locations indicated in the track titles are incomplete and occasionally misleading). The collage borrows, too, from abstract electronic sounds, and a series of conversations with women, recorded up close and woven throughout the work as another anecdotal strand parallel to the sonic one. Spoken material is in French, German, and English (in order of importance). Between the conversations and the puzzling treated field recordings, the listener is left trying to make sense of it all, but the only sense to be found is in the inner logic developed by the composition itself. And there is more than enough to wander around for hours in the meanders of the work. From a Spanish museum to a Texas ranch, a Tuscan highway, a French orchard and a rehearsal in Chicago, Ferrari literally takes us on a journey, intentionally blurring reference points, key sounds reappearing when you least expect them, as to defy the track list which ultimately becomes an arbitrary, two-dimensional grid slapped over a four-dimensional work. On first listen, Les Anecdotiques gives the impression of belonging to academic electro-acoustics, but this apparent formalism hides the kind of fantasy and sonic mischief typical in Ferrari's music. This work deserves a place at the peak of the composer's oeuvre and comes highly recommended. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide
'Cycle des Souvenirs'
Release Date 2/12/2002
Tracks 10
Label Blue Chopsticks
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What The Critics Say
Cycle des Souvenirs was originally an installation for six CD players and four video projectors (the idea of multiple eternally looping tapes dates back to the original installation version of Luc Ferrari's "Music Promenade" in the mid-1960s, and was also incorporated instrumentally in 1970s "Tautologos 3"). Each of the six CDs (for the mixdown into this single-CD version, Ferrari simply started them off at one-minute intervals) contains ten spans of sound -- two two-minute spoken texts, four five-minute "ambiences" recordings of "sounds of everyday life," and four four-minute composed "tonalities" or "harmonic threads," chosen by selecting notes at random. The "ambiences" include exquisite field recordings of the Parisian streets where Ferrari grew up, as well as seaside and insect soundscapes recalling the "Presque Rien" series, a snippet of Thelonious Monk's "Misterioso," and even, apparently, the sound of the composer's wife putting on makeup. They're beautifully recorded and far more interesting than the tonal threads, whose beats and spacey synths do little to spice up the post-impressionist soup. The composer's texts, which are, depending on your point of view, either mildly soporific or gently erotic, are read in three languages with characteristic hushed intimacy. ~ Dan Warburton, All Music Guide
'Interrupteur/Tautologos 3'
Release Date 7/6/1999
Tracks 9
Label Blue Chopsticks
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What The Critics Say
This first issue on former Gastr Del Sol guitarist's own label -- after the demise of Dexter's Cigar which was also a partnership with Jim O'Rourke --- is a reissue in the same tradition as Dexter's. Composer Luc Ferrari's two works "Interrupteur (For 10 Instruments)" and "Tautologos 3 (For 11 Instruments)" were first recorded by EMI in 1970 and have never before been issued in the United States. The significance of these two works from Ferrari's wildly diverse catalogue is that they are both departures from his animated and active music of the '50s and '60s. "Interrupteur" is an orchestral stasis point that begins to move. In the stillness created by the strings, time becomes one long block that creates the opportunity for various timbres and textures to rub against it, creating muted colors and shades. The events that occur inside the written score are chance actions (flurries of woodwinds or brass, a shriek from an errant viola, etc.) and cannot help but to move against that which is already unmoving and therefore deconstruct it gradually and methodically but without the purpose of transforming stasis into anything else but another form. "Tautologos 3" is a score that is cyclic in nature and uses a limited scale of notational devices. Utilizing standard orchestral instrumentation and the electric guitar, and magnetic tape, it is a work that is as hypnotic as it is maddening. The musical "cycles" or themes are short in measure and are played over and again in a patter than moves forward and backward but remains in some way familiar to the listener. During the editing and mixing process, Ferrari manipulated and spliced tape to create other cycles to overlay over the original compositions to that some span of time (as in minutes) would become familiar against a backdrop of something less movement oriented but nonetheless changing as it interacts with the previous cycles (as in weeks). The result is a piecemeal score that drifts and drones its way into the listener's consciousness and changes right at the point where familiarity is established. Both works took Ferrari's fans by surprise, but they followed him anyway, because, true to form, his restlessness took him to further points of abstraction before the end of 1971. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Cellule 75 presents two of music concrète composer Luc Ferrari's 1970s creations: the title track from 1975 followed by "Place des Abbesses," created in 1977 at his own Studio Billig. "Cellule 75" tampers with the percussive function of the instruments and plays with instrumental role-switching and layering. It opens with simple, repeating melodies provided by pianist Chris Brown and percussionist William Winant, backed by a humming machinery ambience. Layers and notes get added onto successive loops, until the phrases become relatively lengthy and complex. After establishing this theme and structure, the variations begin, as the piano switches to soloing, referencing parts of the theme out of different layers, and usurping the phrasing of the other electronic sounds present. The piece is a continuous buildup of musical layers, imperceptibly segued into the beginning's stripped-down simplicity, from which the process starts again, but never turns out the same. After continually playing with the expectations of the close listener, it appropriately closes with several false stops. The second piece begins with slowly turning loops overlaying small electronic swells that pan between channels. This turns into an electronic atmosphere that's a seeming precursor to the "space" of '90s space rock bands, followed by a repeating of the opening form, this time with vocal samples. The panning continues, echoing from side to side, while newly added electronic sounds rise out of the center. About halfway through the piece, Ferrari switches briefly to saxophone and water sounds, providing organic contrast to all of the electronic construction. ~ Joslyn Layne, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
A wonderful sampling of Luc Ferrari's work, Presque Rien also may serve as a smooth introduction to the world of musique concrète. His "Music Promenade," which opens the album, is a combination of ambient sounds (including marching bands and laughing girls) augmented by electronically processed sounds and snatches of other prerecorded music. It's actually illustrative of some of the pitfalls that can occur when a collage of this type is overly forced and the result is somewhat awkward. This is decidedly not the case with "Presque Rien No. 1." While the title translates to "almost nothing," the reality of the piece is far different. Rather, the piece is nothing less than a rich, sonic recreation of an early morning in a Yugoslavian seaside village. Though one knows he must have engaged in substantial manipulation, Ferrari's touch is virtually invisible. Instead one is transported to a beach where bird cries, outboard motors, children singing, and, more than anything, cicadas chirping surround the listener, offering a startlingly immediate sensation of "being there." More, of being in a heightened state of awareness. "Presque Rien No. 2" is a more private, though no less beguiling affair, as the composer talks softly to himself while walking through a very sonically active field. As in the first piece, there are again purely musical adornments, but here they meld beautifully with the natural sounds. ~ Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
These six piano pieces span the career of French composer Luc Ferrari, the earliest, the "Suite pour Piano," dating from 1952 (and reflecting the influence, albeit refracted, of Bartók and Hindemith), the latest, "Comme une Fantaisie Dite des Réminiscences," for two pianos, from 1991. Ferrari writes for the instrument with consummate aplomb (and is no slouch as a pianist himself, having studied the instrument with the legendary Alfred Cortot), and pianists Christine Lagniel and Michel Maurer evidently relish performing the music. From the offbeat distortions of Baroque (in the "Suite") and sonata forms (the revealingly titled "Antisonate") to the exquisite miniatures, at times minimal and motoric, at times deliciously impressionistic, of the "Fragments d'un Journal Intime," Piano -- Piano is a rich and rewarding portrait of a composer known more for his groundbreaking electronic works. Ferrari's sly sense of humor is evident throughout, even in the arch serialism of "Visage I" (indeed, Ferrari must be, along with his friend Mauricio Kagel, the only composer to have made Darmstadt-style serialism fun -- even funny -- to listen to). The "reminiscences" of "Comme une Fantaisie" consist of fragments of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and are integrated seamlessly into the work's larger structure with as much affection as compositional mastery. ~ Dan Warburton, All Music Guide
'Acousmatrix 3: Luc Ferrari: Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysag'
Tracks 4
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What The Critics Say
A lovely work of electro-acoustic music by one of the French pioneers of musique concrète, "Petite Symphonie Intuitive Pour un Paysage de Printemps" ("Little Intuitive Symphony for a Spring Landscape") recreates the composer's experiences during a climb toward sunset on the Causse Méjean, a high plateau in the Massif Central, including his recollection of a shepherd's flute and its reverberations across the landscape. The flute sounds and multiple echoes continue in changing musical modes throughout the piece (the tonic redefined by electronic drones), blending together with sounds of the countryside and conversational fragments from the human presence to create a beautiful sonic landscape of 25 minutes duration. "Hétérozygote" is a musique concrète composition realized on tape; it combines fragments of conversations and other sounds and noises from nature and daily life in an organized and poetic manner (although not plot-oriented). Bits of human speech in several languages are used both for their charm of meaning and their musical qualities of inflection and pitch. At one moment several people express how much they enjoyed having visited some unnamed place. At another moment a mysterious transformed voice chants "dans un reve" (in a dream), but the accompanying sounds are more like the real creaks and crashes of a house in a windy storm, with intermittent disturbed cries from the sleeper. For the first time in a musique concrète work, the sounds are modulated and transformed but retain their natural character; the result is not abstract, but rather moves about the world with the ease of a thought or a dream. In the Presque Rien (Almost Nothing) series of musique concrète pieces, Ferrari further developed this technique and sensibility with sounds and their interconnections that are almost unidentifiable, while nevertheless retaining a feeling of naturalness. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide
