To start, an order from the poet: it was a huge blow of heart. Say more? The beauty of the images of the text, the human sensibility of the poet, the restraint of the words and the tone of the voice, to imagine, to express, to make feel the passage to death and its reflection on us, the living. The music? At the service of the poem, in its traditional role of highlighting images and deep meaning, emotional support. After a first work of analysis and restructuring of the text by silence, comes that of digging the matter and to give it shape and meaning, from images-subjects of the words. The form? From the kaleidoscope game with the memory, and the choice of the game sequence as support 'smooth' to the fragmentation of time and meaning that we encounter in the text. Meaning? Adhere to the text and be forgotten...

Extraordinary system of understanding and classification analogical, concrete and figured of the universe, the tao • sme allows an acousmatic writing based on the materials, the energies, the transformations. Cyclic succession of five elements, natural forces, destroying each other, TAO causes mutations, substitutions of symbols, concrete indices because there is interdependence between them. It is the regulator of the alternation. The following comments, written in a rather long post-publication period, do not reflect the "author's intentions" which are not of importance, but an organization of meaning-for-me, noticed today, long after the moment of music-pleasure. FIRE, second element 1986 Pierre Philippot Action This coin tells a story. It is a narration, the second stage of knowledge, with often metaphorical characters that evolve and intertwine according to the two sides, apparently opposite, of the same substances: inside / outside, matter / artifice, Reality / Symbol, with variations of "listening points" (framing) For example, the (external) breath of the fire and the (internal) breath of the man, the small natural explosions (matter) and their synthetic imitation (artifice) with the big explosions (zoom) of the fireworks, which can also be metaphor of war contemplated as a show to the applause of each camp, through …

It moves..., It moves not... is concerned with rates of change. The initial solo shakuhachi section opens with a ‘model’ structure which is continuously transformed to reveal the potential for change within the original form and a certain inherent resistance to this process. The tape part, realised at the Birmingham University Electroacoustic Music Studio, aims to reinforce or contradict the types of movement in the shakuhachi part, whilst retaining a degree of independence. Much of the source material for the tape is derived from the sound of another Japanese instrument - the shamisen. It moves..., It moves not... was commissioned in 1986 by EMAS with funds provided by the Greater London Arts Association. In addition to analogue source sounds the tape part uses synthetic material, realised in Music-11 at the electronic music studio of Nottingham University.

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

This piece is originally for live 8-tape track mixer, the various tracks constituting as many terminals that the interpreter can play. The version presented here is a mix made in the studio. The sounds on the tape are deliberately left pretty raw, so as to be flexible in mixing and broadcasting. In order to offer interesting gaming possibilities, they also come from a wide variety of sources: concrete sounds, analog and digital synthesis, and digital processing, made at the Pierre Henry Association's Studio Son / Ré, and at the Center for Music Experiment. from the University of California San Diego.

This piece is from a cassette and a series of performance work which I conceived of as an electroacoustical oral history -- what I was calling at the time, electroacoustic literature. These pieces were made up of several interlocking, obsessive, contradictory, and speculative narrations about living and working in San José, California as seen from some vague future. The future could be next week or it could be a thousand years from now. San José, like most California towns, started erasing its past around the 1970’s. One can visit areas of town which used to be an orchard a few years before, to find it filled with a collection of fast food joints. By next week it is a discount outlet warehouse for jogging shoes, then an emporium for off-brand cat food, which burns down on the weekend and then is replaced by a large shopping mall designed to resemble a 19th century quicksilver mine. This attractive construction for some reason goes broke after the first month it is open, and so they grind the whole thing down into dust, which is then used for the concrete for three condominiums and a video store in the same space. Everything is …

The tape part is generated entirely from the recording and manipulation of sounds produced by an alto saxophone, giving a natural homogeneity between the live instrument and the tape. Many saxophone articulations were sampled on the fanlight and underwent treatment or the computer and were then ordered and controlled though the CML (composer page). At times, these were recorded (with DBX) unto the 29 tracks, and multi track reel (when complex testures were sequined) or direct unto the PCM. Editing was done on an otani while other events were created by using traditional tape techniques on revoxs. The work can be divided into equal haves of about seven minutes each. Beginning with the saxophone. Similar material is heaved at the beginning of each half o the tape however the first half beunes a much more introspective journey than the second.

The concept of "And Then She Said" evolved while I was working on the music for the production of "Medea-Plays" conceived and directed by Ed Isser at the Stanford Drama department. Ed had the ingenious idea to use four narrators, backstage, each reciting a different version of the Medea story in a different language (Greek, Latin, French, or German), while four actors on the center stage spoke in English. The rich musical possibilities that this idea offered attracted me immediately. With Ed's permission, I recorded the four narrators in the four languages. They spoke the text just as in the play, but I also included some variations such as having them whisper the text, or sing it on certain specified pitches. I then processed those recordings with a Lexicon digital reverberator, and combined them with some of the computer-generated sounds I had used for the original Medea score. The actress does not play the role of Medea; instead I chose to juxtapose the Greek myth and an opposite idea: the Judeo-Christian symbolism of child sacrifice as the ultimate religious commitment, as in the stories of Isaac and Jesus. The story that I adapted for this piece is that of Hanna …

I worked with Marilyn Monroe's voice as sound material, with the idea that it would be fun to write a "happy piece". It turned out to be not as easy as I'd hoped. The desperateness of Marilyn Monroe came through. There were a lot of levels of dealing with that material and working out that piece, most are by now too hard to describe, but perhaps the most important were the memories; the movie "M" by Fritz Lang, Andy Warhol's "Marilyn" series, and Charles Dodge's "Any resemblance is purely Coincidental", were points of departure for this piece. Most of the tape part consists of transformations of Marilyn Monroe's singing taken from the movie "Some like it Hot", directed by Billy Wilder. These excerpts were manipulated digitally on the F4 computer at the Center for Research in Music and Acoustic (CCRMA) at Stanford University. The orchestra wile a separate entity, comments or ignores the tape.

Recording of Wes Richard Wraggett's La mer de lumière.

In this work, the sound material has been worked in such a way that the live soundtrack and the tape are merged into the sound result and so that there are always new "exchanges" between the two partners.

Material on the tape exposes continuous, rotative movement which we meet playing maracas when they are vertical and turned around axis. We have here a movement around and falling off of little grains from axis. That why title is "Girare" - in Italian "turn" ("twirl"). From here continuous, subtle disturbances and results from them dancing together in rhythm. In the percussion part, the idea of continuity gradually evolves.

"Shiluvim" was composed for the choir "Ankor" and commanded by their leader, A. Meroz. The work is conceived on two levels of combinations: 1. That of electronic sounds and a live performance of a children's choir. 2. The combination of two chords, the minor and G major, while a seventh chord in E-flat mixes with them. The text is composed of syllables that help bridge the gap between the children's voices and the sounds on the tape. Work done at the Studio of the Hebrew University.