Recording of Michael McNabb's City of Reflexion.

Clair-Obscur, commissioned by the Musical Research Group, was composed in 1981-1982. The title refers to the chiaroscuro found in Rembrandt's works: the play of light and shadows that suggests a quasi-autonomous life on the surface of these paintings. In the composition, we find this game, realized in the sound matter, on the surface of which there are perpetual changes of nuances, colors and rhythm. Throughout today's western idiom and the technical means employed, we can hear distant echoes of certain popular music without being able to locate them. Thus very old and very current sources are integrated in a new sound world.

Looking for the fusion between the path and the band "le Tombeau de W.Byrd" attempts to contrast the instrumental character of Byrd's pieces with the various identities of electroacoustic music. Thus, the two writings do not meet, they coexist: one is a point of definition of the other, one is necessary for the existence of the other. Separated by small harpsichord pieces from William Byrd's "Battle", five electroacoustic sequences offer a journey into the world of loop music. Would "Tombeau de William Byrd" not be the opposite of mixed music?

Recording of Philippe Menard's Conte à Niro II.

Recording of Karen Rehnqvist's Musik für värt klimat

Music for a fantastic choreography of black holes. Here are its parts: dancing black holes play the mirliton, the trumpet and the jew's harp; devouring black holes forge protons; vociferous black holes engulf birds and animals; black flutes fill the cold holes with blood; proton saws trump water; fluttering forges arouse black voices.

The Snake Oil Symphony (a metaphor for capitalist social relations, was composed in 1981. The first three "movements" of the Symphony establish the basic themes, along with an underlying rhythmic structure that crops up again and again throughout, as the tempo and pitch of phrases are used to create a sort of melody. Part One presents the surface reality of society as an endless movement of buying and selling, through the use of clips from a sales instruction talk, ads and so on. Woven through this is an ironic verbal-musical motif: "Now you can have this amazing new symphony, right in your own home," (which parodies cheap TV commercials), with piano notes underscoring the spoken pitches. The word "symphony" refers not only to a single work of art, but in the greater sense to "a mighty symphony of prosperity" (i.e. present social and cultural institutions). With the same phrase the composer is also letting the listener know that he knows his own work, too, is a commodity on the culture market. Part Two is built around a multiple pun on the words "alien" and "alienation." "Alienation" originally meant "sale." Marx used the terms to describe the way people give up …

Recording of Denis Smalley's Vortex. "Vortex" focuses first on the types of sound movements that suggest analogies and vortex images, sound objects, textures, and patches of fast-moving sounds, often around an axis. Such movements can evolve in a variety of directions: they can be let go or played. They may have a combined action or follow each other or be engulfed by events of greater strength. The sound events of various attacks, dimensions and orchestrations give vocal points to the movement. They signal climates, initiate changes of direction or change of quality while evolving in their movement. Order of Tim SOUSTER with the help of the Art Council of Great Britain

Inflatable monumental sculpture and piece with eight channels, public show by Antonio Russek and Enrique Luna commissioned for the inauguration of the América Seguros building on Revolucion and Altavista Avenue in Mexico City. Also presented during the Cuba-Mexico Electroacoustic Music Meeting, at the Museum of Modern Art and other forums.

Recording of Maggi Payne's Ling, st/quad with photomicrographic slides. Major concerns of the work are spatial location and modulation and timbral complexity. Processes involved include extensive multi-tracking in order to build up textures, and to keep four tracks consistently separated throughout the process of composing. By pre-mixing and relaying of pre-mixed tracks I frequently use up to thirty-six tracks, finally mixing down in both quad and stereo formats. Ling was composed using the Moog III synthesizer and a set of very sharp resonant seismology filters made by Ling.

Recording of Claude Fatus's Voyager. Using the possibilities of the MIDIM7 system, this realization highlights two classes of sounds that are different in nature: those of the vowel type (simple relation between harmonic partials) and those of the fricative type (complex relation). Use is made of the difference in amplitude and phase as well as the reverberation on identical signals to create a different displacement and localization of the sound event in the speaker space. The whole piece is articulated on the juxtaposition of 5 VOSIM queues of increasing duration which, each, generates 3 other queues at different synchronization.

Recording of Satoshi Sumitani's Quark-W, created in the Studio ETSM of Tokyo in December 1980.

Recording of Hiroaki Minami's Thrène.

Recording of Michael Mac Nabb's Love in the Asylum. Love in the Asylum is a love song to the calculated insanity and spontaneous magic that one must sometimes call upon in order to live in this strange universe of ours. It features an orchestra of familiar instrumental and vocal sounds, new sounds drawn from the imagination, and---perhaps most expressively---sounds that fluidly shift between the two. The work, which critic Paul Lehrman called "one of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces of electronic music I have ever heard", is built of two psychological layers. Foremost is a layer of cheerful confidence and exuberance, colored and occasionally overpowered by a dark emotional undercurrent of anxiety and psychological imbalance. All sounds in Love in the Asylum were synthesized except for the laughter and the player calliope music. It includes a number of musical quotations, including quotations from other works of electroacoustic music. The spatial sound paths at the beginning of the first movement are from Turenas (1972) by John Chowning, who was a primary mentor, and influenced McNabb's decision to specialize in electroacoustic music and performance.

Recording of Satoshi Sumitani's Quark R.

Recording of Gary Lee Nelson's Phrase Structure Seven. The work was created using formalized compositional procedures. These algorithms were expressed as computer programs written in APL and MPL (Musical Program Library). The focus in this piece is on techniques for producing directed movement in a synthetic medium. The tonal and rhythmic materials were generated by an APL program which controls interval sequences. The production rules for intervals were concerned with stylistic coherence. Intervals were limited to small vocabularies. Global aspects of structure were governed by "conductor functions". These line graphs were used to regulate the temporal unfolding unfolding dynamics, timbre, melodic contour, textural density, spatial location, and tempo/rubato in each phrase. In Melbourne Australia, the work was done on an Interdata 3042 computer running the UNIX operating system. APL and MPL were implemented interpretively using a program written in C. The sound synthesis was carried out with MUSIC 5. The interface between MPL and MUSIC 5 was via notecard images.

A recording of Barry Truax's East Wind for amplified recorder and four soundtracks. This work creates an intimate relation between the soloist, who performs on both alto and tenor recorder, and the tape, whose sounds are entirely derived from the modern and Renaissance soprano, alto, tenor, and contrabass recorders. The transformed sounds on tape create a "larger than life" image of the recorder through its harmonic drones, its extensions of human breath, its pipe-like resonances and percussive transients, and moreover, through reference to its history of creating melody in the various related instruments that are found in many cultures. The live part interacts closely with the tape environment, mimicking it, commenting on it, riding its waves, and in the end, restraining it, as suggested by the I Ching hexagram Number 9, The Taming Power of the Small. Rain clouds in China, observes the I Ching, are brought by the east wind; it condenses water vapor into clouds, but in this case is not strong enough to create rain. The work is dedicated to Peter Hannan who commissioned it with the aid of the Canada Council. The tape part was realized in the Sonic Research Studio at Simon Fraser University, and …

A recording of John Celona's Music in Circular Motions. "Music in circular motions" was produced using DISTRA, a real-time polyphonic 4-channel spatial movement computer performance program created by the composer for a New England Digital Synthesizer at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. The control language for DISREA is called "Moxie, written by Doug Collinge, and is a set of XPL procedures which deal with events in real-time. In DISTRA, the composer uses a keyboard and CRT terminal through which programmable controls are utilized during composing and performing. Pitch (available in equal - and 31- tone temperament as well as just intonation) is input through the keyboard and orchestrated in real-time with varieties and variations of spatial movement, multi-segment envelopes, wave shaping FM, volume controls, filter effects, delays, and tempo changes. In addition, several automated routines are available procuring program switching of spatial distribution patterns, volume cycles, sequential execution of envelop arrays, modulation ration and index arrangements, Changes may be input on a micro-level (e.g., replacing c:m rations or selecting new envelopes during ongoing sound events) or on a macro-level where larger compositional contexts are manipulated. Thus, the composer operates synchronously on three interactive levels: performer (playing instruments-conductor (shaping and …

Recording of Daniel Steven Crafts Snake Oil Symphony. The Snake Oil Symphony (a metaphor for capitalist social relations), was composed in 1981. The first three "movements" of the Symphony establish the basic themes, along with an underlying rhythmic structure that crops up again and again throughout, as the tempo and pitch of phrases are used to create a sort of melody. Part One presents the surface reality of society as an endless movement of buying and selling, through the use of clips from a sales instruction talk, ads and so on. Woven through this is an ironic verbal-musical motif: "Now you can have this amazing new symphony, right in your own home," (which parodies cheap TV commercials), with piano notes underscoring the spoken pitches. The word "symphony" refers not only to a single work of art, but in the greater sense to "a mighty symphony of prosperity" (i.e. present social and cultural institutions). With the same phrase the composer is also letting the listener know that he knows his own work, too, is a commodity on the culture market. Part Two is built around a multiple pun on the words "alien" and "alienation." "Alienation" originally meant "sale." Marx used the …

Recording of Patrick Fleury's Reflux. This piece was completely generated on the New England Digital System at Marseilles. Then, the composer transformed all the basic materials in the analogy-mixing studio at IPEM de Gent. Studio of realisation: Groupe de Musique Experimentale de Marseille for the generation on New England Digital System. Institute voor Psychoacustica en Elektronische Musiek for all treatments and mixing.

Recording of Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco, for electroacoustic sounds processed by computer. The piece was created at the IRCAM. This piece relates to his experiences at the Winchester Cathedral and based on the tenor bell there with the incription "Horas avolantes numero mortuos plango: vivos ad preces voco." This text is echoed by the voice of the young boy. The pitch and the temporal structure of the piece is entirely based on the very rich and harmonically irregular spectrum of the bell, structure which is neither tonal, nor dodecaphonic, nor modal in the manner Western or Eastern, but was completely unique. The eight sections of the piece represent each of the lowest principal partials.

Recording of Durand Begault's Funny Death. "The composition invites the listener to consider the movement of sounds and the synthetic space which they move through. Funny Death should be listened to in darkness so that concentration of the movement may be facilitated." - Durand Begault

Recording Theresa Rampazzi's Danza Seconda.

A recording of Maggi Payne's Circular Motions. Circular Motions was composed using a Moog III synthesizer and multi-track recording studio. Major concerns deal with spatial location and complex timbral changes. The video was created in real time utilizing a digital frame storage video system designed and built by video artist Ed Tannenbaum as well as and a Fairlight video processor. Reflective tape was used on a variety of objects which the composer choreographed, as well as fireworks and other light emitting objects. The composer intercut several takes to provide the final version.