Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Gunner Møller Pedersen - Et Lydår, A Sound Year (Danachord, 1982; Dacapo, 2001)


Gunner Møller Pedersen belongs to the second generation of Danish makers of tape music, leaning more on the spacier Else Marie Pade end of the spectrum than the sputtering Jørgen Plaetner-styled one. Though delightfully excessive in its own right, Et Lydår displays much more respect for day-to-day responsibilities than some of his other works. Et Lydår is essentially an aural calender. Pedersen created a thirty minute piece representing each month of the year, amounting to six (!!!) discs of music. It's easy to consider this completely out of hand, until you realize you've lived an entire year in just six hours. That kind of savings doesn't come cheap. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, here it is condensed into a measly stereo. I'm far underqualified to speak to the month-to-month changes in Denmark, but he could have easily veered into the overly literal yet did not. "February" does conjure an icy expanse, while "June" is surprisingly pastoral. On the whole, each piece maintains an impressive balance of imagery and abstraction. He's clearly well-humored enough not to overdo things by accident.

Et Lydår
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

8 comments:

  1. Outstanding post. Many, many thanks

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  2. It has been a very good year so far, and I'm only in Summer. Awesome music from the less-is-more school of electronic composers. Thanks a lot.

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  3. Glad this has passed muster for the three of you.

    @continuo: I believe at the time of writing you were just reaching some of my favorite parts of the album, along with the last two of the year.

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  4. wow ! I´ve been looking for this for years and years . THX !!! / METEK

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  5. Thanks for this!!!...I've owned the vinyl box-set for years...there seems to be less and less time to listen to lp's these days... or the cd age has made me very lazy!...now to zone-out big-time!

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  6. Highly recommended. It's one of my No. 1 electronic music pieces (well, stretching over 8 hours). Headphone music, definitely! In terms of style I would describe it as "expressionist ambient"

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