WNMD 2025 · CONCERTS 22 & 23
Cinema for the Ear #2 / Cinema para os ouvidos #2
06-06-2025 · 14h30
O’culto da Ajuda
Lisbon
Bilheteira · Box Office (O’culto)
MISO MUSIC PORTUGAL LOUDSPEAKER ORCHESTRA
CONCERT 22
ADRIAN MOORE (UK, 1969)
Ceramics, 8’
BEKAH SIMMS (Canada, 1990) YCA
spore wind ii: swamp thing (2023), 9’
Individual submission
CLÁUDIO DE PINA (Portugal, 1977)
Neurotransmits (2023), 10’
Individual submission
ROXANNE TURCOTTE (Canada, 1960)
Masques et dichotomies (2021), 10’
ISCM Canadian section
CONCERT 23
BARRY TRUAX (Canada, 1947)
What The Waters Told Me (2022), 12’
Individual submission
HANNA HARTMAN (Sweden, 1961)
The Navigators (2023), 11’
ISCM Gotland section
JAIME REIS (Portugal, 1983)
Fluxus, Pas Trop Haut Dans Le Ciel (2017), 9’
TODOR TODOROFF (Belgium, 1963)
Voices Part IV Hallucinations (2024), 11’
Individual submission
YCA · ISCM Young Composers Award candidate
PROGRAMME NOTES
ADRIAN MOORE (UK, 1969)
Ceramics
— [Programme notes available soon]
BEKAH SIMMS (Canada, 1990) YCA
spore wind ii: swamp thing (2023)
Individual submission
— spore wind ii: swamp thing is an excerpted version of the audiovisual jaw harp concerto spore wind, an electroacoustic work written for the prolific improviser and film maker Darcy Spidle, who performs under the moniker chik white. It is intended for stand-alone presentation as an acousmatic (speakers/visuals only) version.
Darcy possesses an outrageous and idiosyncratic sound: ancient and tiny instruments closely amplified to the point of grotesquerie, filled with bodily subnoise and percussive mouth sounds. He amplfies the small into the brutal, the familiar into the disembodied and unclear. His avant garde approach to the jaw harp revealed a shape to the work: the poisoning and decay of familiar sounds, moving from the “classical” contextualizing of the jaw harp into something entirely alien to its source. The sounds “beneath” the musical sound – the sounds of tone production, the body moving to articulate – would be amplified and turned into musical material. Sounds travel and mutate and become increasingly “distant” from its home source – spores floating in the toxic wind.
spore wind ii: swamp thing reflects the destructions of sound source as an analogue to the disfigurement of living beings (swamp “thing”) and environment. By expanding the vocabulary, we remove the recognizable and face a dilemma of identity and purpose: with so much harm to answer for, are we men or monster?
CLÁUDIO DE PINA (Portugal, 1977)
Neurotransmits (2023)
Individual submission
— Neurotransmits (anagram of ‘number stations’) is an electroacoustic composition that explores the eerie and mysterious world of number stations. Featuring sounds from “The Buzzer”, “The Pip” (Russia), Lincolnshire Poacher (United Kingdom), among others from different countries (Sweden, Hungary, Poland and Cuba). The piece conjures the atmosphere of a spy listening in on clandestine transmissions in a safehouse.
The sounds of the number stations are woven together with the electronic hum and other electronic apparatus, evoking a sense of Cold War operations. Other sounds mimic capacitors discharging such as bullets and bouncing balls. They are processed to decay since they are part of the same secret code. As the piece progresses, the listener is drawn deeper into the world of the number stations, with the sounds becoming increasingly complex and layered, walking a thin line between abstract and abstracted sounds. The transmissions blend together and intertwine, creating an atmosphere of tension and intrigue.
Neurotransmits invites the listener to enter a world of covert operations, riddles, and intrigue, where hidden codes and transmissions pulse through the airwaves, and the listener is left to wonder what is the meaning of these messages, from were are they being transmitted, and to whom.
ROXANNE TURCOTTE (Canada, 1960)
Masques et dichotomies (2021)
ISCM Canadian section
— A cicada sound, saved from the mouth of a cat, makes the link between reality and dream. It emits this dry noise in my hand while regaining its spirits, then flies away. Waves, used to structure the work, move in all directions to the great pleasure of nature, while leaving its residents adrift and silence was. What happens to us humans? Where are our lakes, our birds, our lands? Are we punished for that? This world that we are gradually killing? Are our voices cut off, masked forever?
Search for subliminal and psychoacoustic effects: masking phenomenon, filtering and marked bass frame, deaf and evolving sounds, beats, inversions, electroacoustic treatments and counterpoint. I had fun reproducing these sound effects with a frequency equalizer on a prerecorded voice, thus modifying the vocal timbre according to the type of fabric, the thickness, the dimension and the number of layers of an imaginary mask, to then make the original vocal timbre clearer and distinct. Water is a leitmotiv in the background and represents the ways to heal the evil of the century, pandemics, wars of this world. Coughing and sneezing are arranged on different planes in space. We are all sick. Some conversations, captured with an ambisonic recorder, are integrated.
BARRY TRUAX (Canada, 1947)
What The Waters Told Me (2022)
Individual submission
— If we listen carefully to flowing water in all of its varied forms, we may begin to hear voices and ascribe human emotions to them. The voices may be argumentative, even angry, as at the start of our journey, but suddenly they become hushed as we enter a large cavern. A mysterious voice seems to give us commands as we await the next stage, while ethereal voices guide us along. The commands become more insistent until the waters burst forth with transcendent song in a celebration of water and life.
HANNA HARTMAN (Sweden, 1961)
The Navigators (2023)
ISCM Gotland section
— På våren flyger de norrut. Nattetid,
De hittar i mörkret. I skogen.
Under stjärnhimlen och på öppet have.
De navigerar i Tokyo, San Francisco,
och Rom. Att hitta vägen hem.
Att ha mod att gå vilse.
JAIME REIS (Portugal, 1983)
Fluxus, Pas Trop Haut Dans Le Ciel (2017)
— Commissioned within the frame of the project The Soundscape we live in, a European Project organized in collaboration with GMVL, Tempo Reale, Amici della musica de Cagliari, AFEA and Ionian University.
The main electronic realization was made in a residency at the Studios of Musiques & Recherches (Belgium, Brussels, Ohain).
Selected as finalist work for the 10th biennal acousmatic composition competition Métamorphoses (Belgium) and Prix Russolo 2018 (France/Italy).
This piece belongs to the Fluxus cycle, whose pieces are inspired by elements of physics and in which musical elements related to physical phenomena on fluid mechanics are developed. This particular piece is centered in ideas related to what I have called “aerial” soundscapes. The formal development is based on three pillars that were inspired Bernie Krause's concepts geophony, biophony, and anthropophony (géophonie, biophonie, anthropophonie). The sections are interconnected through specific spatial movements that show our hide their own paths, recognition of sound sources and other events in order to create moments that are more or less clear in the perception of themselves.
TODOR TODOROFF (Belgium, 1963)
Voices Part IV Hallucinations (2024), acousmatic music, 16, 12 or 8 tracks
Individual submission
— In the cycle Voices, Voices Part IV – Hallucinations continues the exploration of the human voice, its resonances and transformations. Journeys through intuitions and analogies, disruptions of the senses and phantasmagoria with the words of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, taken mainly from A season in Hell and inspired by the letters known as “of the Visionary”.
Nourished by the vocal explorations of François Vaiana, founding member of the Brussels Vocal Project, accompanied by a wide variety of digital processing, either in real-time at the time of recording, with auditory feedback, or after the recording. This work puts a special focus on the use of personally developed analysis-resynthesis software, allowing to modify the analysed voice in multiple ways by extracting the partials and resynthesizing them in a multichannel sound space with various waveforms and modulated phase distortions, after several selection and frequency modification processes, ranging from inharmonic textures to quasi-orchestral sounds.