Search - M. Redolfi, Michel Redolfi Ensemble :: Sonic Waters 2

Maybe it works better when heard underwater

Discophage | France | 10/08/2007

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Watery sounds, resonances of bells, slow-moving, dreamy music, here and there what seems to be a snippet excerpted from Rautavaara's Cantus Articus (flutes and birds) and from time to time the altered harp arpeggios - you're surprised not to see the fairy's powder fall from the twinkling stars. Nothing new, not particularly interesting. Maybe it works better when heard underwater.



(In the late 70s and early 80s Redolfi, a French "acousmaticien", designed and patented underwater loudspeakers and conceived tape music to be played and heard underwater, as a way of experimenting new physical modes of sonic perception and new social modes of concert gathering. That music - "Sonic Waters" - was released on 2 LPs by Hat Hut in 1982 and apparently hasn't been reissued on CD: Redolfi seems to have put a ban on any subsequent performance of it, feeling that he'd taken his underwater works some steps beyond that first essay. What you get here are three water-inspired pieces composed between 1983 and 1989, the most ambitious being the 32-minute "Full Scale Ocean", a condensation of "the distant echoes, fragile and now dream-like" of that pionnering work - my translation; the English translation in the liner notes is amateurish).



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