"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.

"Ellipse" is a music designed for a mime. The musical structure follows exactly the scenario proposed by the mime, while trying to integrate as much as possible to the movements performed on stage. The sound material is very small. All the music was built from two synthetic sounds programmed on a Yamaha DX 7 synthesizer and breathing sounds, sampled by a PPG synthesizer. Compositionally, the work is designed to establish a single formal unit. The development is very progressive and always attached to the same theme - that of the beginning, which, after all the transformations undergone, returns to the end to complete the trajectory of the ellipse. Formally, the music has three major parts defined according to the action expressed by the mime: - The first part presents the basic motif, whose envelope marked by the change of the pitch, becomes clear through the progressive widening of the duration of the sound. - In the second part, the breath that was present from the beginning as a component of the timbre becomes an independent element. The melodic motifs undergo harmonic modulations and are transformed into timbres by rhythmic accelerations. - In the third part the thematic elements assume dramatic …

Recording of John Celona's Emerald Soft.

Environs was written as environmental performance piece for outside performance in a large, open, urban square. It deals with our surroundings and the ways in which we perceive ourselves within the environment. In this case surroundings is taken in the broadest sense – physical, spatial, temporal, emotional. The piece focuses on the use of sound to manipulate our perception of the environment and attempts to create a new context in which new relationships lead to new forms of experience. Environs is scored for three Emulator II digital sampling keyboard instruments, soprano saxophone, tenor voice, and visual images. It mixes recognizable and abstract sounds to create a sometimes surrealistic, sometimes serene world of sound and image. Sounds present within the natural environment are welcome to mix into the piece to forge an integration with the real world.

Recording of Gabriel Brnčić's Des Etres. This work is dedicated to the memory of Oscar Masotta, a specialist in psychoanalysis and semiology. This is music that recalls the atmosphere of the first montages of the imaginary theater that Oscar Masotta created in the 60s in Buenos Aires and to which I collaborated by producing infinite quantities of sound. Now, a viol and a computer, in eight-voice polyphony, constitute this absence of being, constantly speaking of its presence.

Recording of Bernard Parmegiani's Exercisme 3.

In short: the "support" on tape is a very capillary tension of the "Fantasia" for flute alone. The canon - in 4 parts - of the "Fantasia" is realized (here it is only a tale "virtual" and melodic point) by groups of four voices each; the most acute of the groups is a game of echoes with the same note as the flute alone. In addition, within the 24 parts, several sizes all specular shapes and three transpositions (1/3 of a tone each time). The three inner groups are recorded with a contralto flute. Always by Roberto Fabbriciani. The stylistic goal is to get a labyrinth delirious around the solo instrument: like a huge vegetation that stifles a small plant.

"... no, it's not a joke, Sir. It's not a joke as it's not cinematic music from a sinister movie. It's my imperfect tribute to the perfect composer who was always capable of seeing things as they are: neither funny nor tragic, or if you prefer, funny and tragic at the same time. It is my tribute to his wisdom which - yes, I must admit - is difficult to attain. I always come back to Mozart when this trivial dialectic is too apparent in my life. This time I did the same. It helped me. It made me understand that when everything falls apart, there is always Kyrie eleison left. You are not serious, Sir, are you? You are not seriously serious? I like Mozart. I do like Mozart. And he was not. No, it's not a joke. It's not cinematic music either. It is a piece of my music, it's a piece of his music. And... don't be too serious; it ain't gonna work, Sir. It ain't gonna work..." Excerpts from an unwritten letter Farewell Variations on a Theme by Mozart was composed at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University, and was awarded …

The title refers to the name of the tooth-shaped device that, on a sewing machine, serves to advance the fabric. In this work, the different functions of a sewing machine are combined with the voice to create a contrast between the timbre qualities of a woman's voice and the industrial and metallic sounds, sometimes abrasive, of the machine. Voice and machine are assembled elliptically, sometimes dry and inhibited, sometimes smeared and hallucinatory to assert new meanings and signs. With the voice of Deanna Ferguson.

This piece was composed for three instruments and a live computer electronics system that includes a DMX-1000 Signal Processing Computer,and Transfer Processor (designed by Jo Scherpenisse), a PDP-11/34 computer, a PDP-11/23 computer and other equipment at the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands. In this piece, the PDP-11/23 computer controls a Transfer-Processor and the PDP-11/34 computer controls a DMX-1000. The main program for the PDP-11/23 was written in FORTRAN and for the PDP-11/34 in PASCAL. The Transfer-Processor handles 256K memory where the sound of instruments, sampled live from the stage via the A/D converter, is stored. The Transfer-Processor deals with these sampled and stored instrumental sounds in memory and manages to produce sound via D/A converters. It also samples and produces sound at the same time. On the DMX-1000, three real-time computer sound synthesis programs written in micro-code, are running. In two of them, the instrumental sounds from the stage are sampled via A/D converters and their pitch and amplitude control some parameters for the real-time computer sound synthesis. During the performance, the synchronization (timing adjustment) between players and a live computer electronics system is realized by controlling two PDP-11 computers at two terminals in the concert hall. This piece …

When you reach "the zenith of your life", you may be tempted to look at your past. Moving forward to the future is not easy. Reflections on the past can occur spontaneously without a particular structure, and by fugitive associations. Memories of various episodes appear unrelated. For Jon II is a piece where the main form of music is based on a similar process. The various parts of the piece seem to lack obvious connections and a clear structure principle for the whole piece. Small episodes or "little musical stories" follow each other without any apparent sequence, which means brutal changes and sharp contrasts, as the most important characters of the composition. The piece is divided into 3 movements. The first two movements can be played separately. The designation of the 3 movements is I: vivace, II: Intermezzo and III: finale. For Jon II is the last part of a book that has 4 and is now complete. The other pieces are: For Jon I (fragments of a time to come) 1977; For Jon III (they extricated their extremities) 1982; Epilogue; rhapsody of the second harvest, 1979.

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 …

It is an hypnotic and repetitive music, originally composed for a choreography about sacred dance. The title is a clear reference to the west ancient land in the Atlantic ocean.

The composition uses the traditional structure of theme and variations in extended form and therefore could have also been called "Variations on a Children's Dance". It may be divided into four parts. 1) introduction of a part of the transformed theme 2) transformed variations on the theme and its variations 3) the theme 4) variations on the theme The theme (3) is a little Hungarian gipsy children's dance. I composed, realized and stored it and the variations on this theme (4) on analogue tape in 1983. The sound is produced by 24 analogue and 16 digital oscillators with the help of my own music program ILI (Interactive List Interpreter). After I built up a software communication system between different signal processing programs (Makrostikon), and after Paul Pignon`s Giant Fourier Transform program was ready to be used, I started to work on the piece in 1986. The new softwares allowed me to to continue work on the original material {3, 4). To start with, I digitized the theme and its variations (3, 4) made in 1983, and stored them in the VAX computer system of EMS, Stockholm. The working procedure afterwords included analysis, resynthesis, transformation and mixing. The underlying structure of …

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.

Recording of Stanisław Krupowicz's Half Way Through.

"Hapsis" is a cello room in its own right. This one indeed is present not only on stage, but also through transformations carried out using digital means, exclusive material of the band. These transformations are not radical, it was not for me, thanks to virtuoso manipulations to "reinvent" the cello, but on the contrary to constantly keep the imprint by the development of some of its characteristics. No unheard sounds, but the meeting between a cello and his double and a constant concern for balance between the two for what I hope to be a small tribute to this instrument. Work done at the INA-GRM in Paris.

This piece is written for three trumpets, two trombones, tuba and harp. Some electroacoustic transformations of these instruments enrich its texture with new sounds. The three movements form contrasts of each other. In the first movement alternate fixed and released rhythms / parlando-rubato-allegro. The second movement has a free texture. On the contrary, the third is a rhythmic and fast movement. The performers of the pieces are: Gy. Geiger, I. Trumpet / L. Szabo, II. Trumpet / I. Somorjai, II. Trumpet / G. Höhna, I. Trombone / K. Egressy, II. Trombone / V. Szabo, Tuba / E. Maros, Harp. Sound engineer: P. Winkier

Recording of Zack Settel's Homage for Peter Lampheris.