Voudouris, Demetris - PFAI.1/PALMOS/NPFAI.3/PRAXIS
SKU
POGUS21043
"A South African composer of Greek birth, Voudouris is interested in the "research of cognitive psycho-acoustic behavioral patterns in humans and the behavior of sound in relationship to continued environmental changes". Don't let the composer's difficult description fool you into thinking about some kind of cerebral pretentiousness, though, as this album contains instead four magnificent examples of his approach, music that's always challenging and, in many of its expressions, of extraordinary beauty. "NPFAI" stands for "New Possibilities For African Instrument"; the two namesake pieces are electroacoustic studies, one for kundi and m'bira, the other for African marimba. In both cases, Voudouris processes the instrumental sources via computer to originate soundscapes that mix the "percussive and organic" sonic environments generated by these fascinating textures. An extremely individual character comes out of these experiments, which produce hundreds of separated aural events that nevertheless find their unique place in the air once they're out of the speakers, finally spreading like an indivisible whole; the properties of the main instruments are soon forgotten in favour of a multidirectional modification of our sense of belonging to the very music. "Palmos", for Hammond organ, oboe and bandoneon, is a wonderful pseudo-static, ever-morphing halo of interacting overtones; Voudouris states that "consciousness itself is a vibration pattern" and I take my hat off to him for two reasons: one, he's the first artist who confirms what I've always believed and two, the awesome radiance of this piece, which really throws us into an ocean of doubts without a clue about the relationships between safe mental harbors and the perennial fear of the unknown. "Praxis" makes great use of a Christian Orthodox Greek male choir (computer processed, too), ending the disc with the most heterogeneous offer, a cross of mournful recollections and radical experimentation that will put many contemporary acousmatic composers under the threat of sounding surpassed. Sepulchral lamentations and modified pitches, obtained from a damaged recording of the memorial services for the Croatian genocides held in 1999 in Sofiatown, Johannesburg, work much better as a means of protest than a million words."-Touching Extremes