Monday, August 31, 2009

Francois Bayle - Erosphère (INA-GRM, 1990)



Easy to get confused here, as this is not Bayle's 1982 Erosphère LP (which it so happens the fine folks at Mutant Sounds posted here), but instead the flagship voyage collecting Bayle's complete works onto cd. Rather than feature Erosphère in its entirety, it contains one fourth of the original album, the 1978 piece Toupie Dans Le Ciel along with another piece from 1978 titled Tremblement De Terre Très Doux.

Tremblement De Terre Très Doux captures one of Bayle's long standing fascinations, the soundings of metal objects, here largely a metal marble and chimes of some sort. These sounds travel in and out of the foreground, sometimes submerged in flittering manipulation and other times unadorned. Bayle juxtaposes real and artificial space in a seamless fashion, his sounds unfolding at a energetic but serene pace. Toupie Dans Le Ciel builds sparse melodies from a succession of swelling figures, and atop that steadily vibrating upper figures are laid. With only minor variation, these two elements float the five movements with a depth and pulse that stunningly anticipates Wolfgang Voigt's Gas at its most gentle stride.

Erosphère

3 comments:

  1. Downloaded both the Mutant Sounds album (listening to as I type - Very nice) and your album. The files names are a bit different, but the names and times match up. Sure seems to be entirely the same material. Your version has a better sample rate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Further research including looking at the comments at Mutants Sounds reveals that the at Mutant Sounds version is not the original album but rather the same one you have here.

    ReplyDelete