This is a retelling of a traditional narrative about a farmer who puts a spell on an unknown person who was stealing his vegetables.

This composition is music for a ballet, made for the The National Ballet of Iceland and was first performed in November 1986 in Reykjavík. Amalgam is an alloy of mercury. Practically all metals will form alloys of amalgams with mercury, with the notable exception of iron. Amalgams are used as dental materials and as electrodes in various industrial and laboratory electrolytic processes. The ballet was made for six dancers, dressed in gray tight clothes with a golden stripe on the back walking, standing, and dancing on a narrow, strong light beams

"Acufeni" are auditory phenomena: hearing buzzings or hisses that are not outside but inside ear. Briefly: one cannot stop these sounds anyway. So, nearly all the sounds in thie piece are long, dark, and static. A "pedal" bass tone goes from beginning to end; throughout the 10 minutes, it raises its pitch very slightly from E-flat to A-flat (approximately 1/2 tone each two minutes). Either sounds make different episodes; sometimes, these episodes are based upon contrasts. More frequently upon repetition. How to listen to: darkness (or closed eyes); calm; not searching for anything in the music, but quietly waiting for it, aware that it could also never come.

Recording of Peter Beyls' Arena.

When I realized the electronic music of "Astratto", in the 1986, I already founded with other composers the S.I.M. (Società di Informatica Musicale) in Rome , and we worked about the design of a digital systems controlled by host PC and based on the application of the TMS 32010 16/32 bit DSP Texas Instrument. It was one of the first world application of this new technologies in the field of electronic music. At that time one of the DSP systems was controlled by an 16bit Host Pc. The DSP system, called Fly system, was interfaced with the host and with a musical keyboard (no MIDI interface) and I worked with simple real time routines written in TMS 320 assembly that I already experimented in a my previous digital piece. In the case of "Astratto" we have already improved the possibilities of the synthesis by table look oscillators and the record / play system from the musical keyboard, and multiple complex events can be recorded in the same time. So I could realized the music in real time mode, and to record the note-events on the Host PC. (24 real time enveloped oscillators can be computed at 16khz of sampling rate). …

Recording of Johannes Poort's Berg.

Aeotearoa is the original Maori name for "the country of the long white cloud". The singing of these unique birds was recorded in New Zealand, then transferred to a digital recording and processed at the EMS of the University of Texas at Austin. 1) The Kokako is native to New Zealand and normally lives in the rain forest of the coast. His song perhaps evokes the oboe d'amour. It consists of a series of motifs, unique by the bird. Here the composer was particularly struck by the motif that ends with a rising quintile and has used it a lot in this movement. These motifs are sung here and there, sometimes with variations of rhythm and arrangement of notes, but always followed by a pause as if, perhaps Kokako was waiting for an answer. These long breaks determined the shape of this movement. After a while the bird gets an answer, maybe a little different from what he expected. Kokako is one of the endangered species. Thanks to the careful protection of the New Zealand government, it seems that he can be saved. 2) The bell bird lives mostly in New Zealand. At the first meeting, it may seem like …

Recording of Ben Guttman's The Birth or Report From the Bird of a New Weather.

Recording of Philippe Blanchard's La Boîte de Pandore.

Recording of Andrea Vitale's Les bons sauvages se mangèrent la douce Politta.

Recording of Klaus Ager's C.L.B. 512 for clarinet and recording.

Pastoral work with the song of an opening merle.

Dedicated to Hélène Berton Sound Production based on texts from Marie Uguay Voices (by appearance order): Marthe Turgeon, Jean-Pierre Matte, Marie-Claude Trépanier, Gilles Laforce. The reading of the used texts suggest the creation of "poetic characters" that are so many views, words, interpretations stemming from the poetry. These caracters, which are four in number, were confided to many different voices: actor or radio-speaker, female or male, natural or transformed, alone or multiplied. In addition to this radio-style uses of the voice, are the electroacoustic ones by the use of interpretation choirs where the narrators echo the many-sided meaning of the poetry. The tittle was choosen in reference of an hospital room and also of this place, represented by the white colour-which included all the others-located between the birth and the death, maybe the ones of Marie Uguay (who was prematuraly dead in 1981 at the age of twenty-five), where all the virtualities, all the possibles are permitted. La Chambre Blanche was realised in 1985-86 at my own studio and at the studio of University of Montréal. This creation was possible following a grant from the Explorations program of the Canada Council. The texts of Marie Uguay come from the anthologies …

The musical idea of ​​this piece - apart from the ventral expression, direct and inexplicable - is the multiplication of sounds; each played sound produces a multitude of other sounds; contrapuntal, barely audible, fireworks, etc. As far as the technical aspect is concerned, the structure of the IT processes is part of the idea of ​​controlling a sound computer by something more imminent and more subtle than the computer keyboard keys, than potentiometers or a mouse. . The sound of the piano is picked up by microphones, processed by a signal processor (the DSP16X of the Swiss Center of Computer Music, programmed by Nicolas Sordet) and reinjected by means of loudspeakers. We then try to obtain a mix, between the acoustic sound of the piano and the sound produced by the computer, as balanced as possible, the speakers being placed around the piano accordingly. This is how the piano seems sometimes multiplied sometimes transformed into an instrument with new sounds. The process consists of analyzing zero crossings of the order form and reacting to the sound thus analyzed according to pre-established rules. Different sets of rules thus generate the different sections of the part. The piano has established macrostructures, but …

Recording of Alexander Mihalič's Composition pour Piano et Bande.

Cordes de Nuit was assembled in MIDI code and produced using a rack of DX/TX FM sound modules. The work is based on single voice and is structurally modelled after the sound of distinguished violinist Paul Kling, former concert-master of the Tokyo and St. Louis Orchestras. Global and micro changes in vibrato are controlled using mixes between Pythagorean and Equal-Tempered tunings. Over 200 spectral bandwidths are often sounded simultaneously. The work is dedicated to Iannis Xenakis whom I studied with in 1972.

"Cryogénie" was composed in 1986 in the electroacoustic music studio of CNR Amiens. Selected at the electroacoustic music competition of Bourges 1986.

Recording of Ira Mowitz's Darkening. "Darkening" was originally the first part of a longer piece. In the process of assembling the piece, it becomes clear that this first occult music was called to a life of its own. The remaining music is now his companion "A Shimmering." This work was produced in 1986 at Stanford on Concept Digital Systems, Synthesizer, the "sambase.”

"Deliberate Disguises" takes its title from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men". Although the piece was not intended to be programmatic, much of its sonic material as well as its formal construction were inspired by the aural and visual imagery of the poem. The works was completed over the summer of 1986 in the McGill Electronic Studio.

It makes use of the MIRY program which allows the computer to " listen " and response to the actions of the clarinetist. The software creates rearticulations and transformations of the musical material it " hears " from the clarinet thus creating a real-time improvisational dialogue between the performer and the computer. Despite the limited capabilities of small computers, the system is able to produce interesting musical responses by focusing on perceptually salient aspects of the live performance. The computer only deals with the simplest and most basic musical elements - patterns of pitch, dynamics, and durations, yet these sufficient resources for musical interaction with a live performer. A digital eclogue explores a series of textures articulated by changes in orchestration and levels of clarinet activity. The clarinetists is free to interact improvisationally with the computer's responses - establishing a unique relationship whereby the performer is both determining and responding to the output of the computer.

Recording of Jonathan Berger's Diptych.

Work done in 1986. The material of the band comes from controlled improvisations of a guitarist. It was mainly transformed by a Serge synthesizer. After composing the band part, Laakso composed a live guitar part that includes some small movements of freedom for the performer. The work was done in close collaboration with guitarist Seppo Siirala who also played the solo guitar part on this band. Technical assistant Juhani Liimatainen.

Eclipse reflects the ongoing interest of the composer in evolutionary processes as models for musical ideas evolve simultaneously, but their evolution also reflects their interaction with each other. There are areas of predominance for the different musical entities and periods during which each is dormant. The large scale form of the 20 minute piece is in two halves of almost equal duration. The first half is itself in two parts during each of which a different type of musical element is predominant. In the second half of Eclipse there are more struggles for predominance among the materials.

Elasticity begins with the sound exploration of very simple materials, especially elastics. Through extensive studio manipulation, the sound has been transformed until it is far from resembling the original material, in its place, buzzing and liquid textures combine to form an imaginary space. Work done at Simon Fraser University.