Browse by Artist: FERRARI, LUC

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Archives Sauvees Des Eaux
Label:	ANGLE RECORDS (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	ANGLE 008CD

"Luc Ferrari is one of the most legendary musical figures of the twentieth century, whose work and aesthetic continue to influence several generations of contemporary composers. Among the founders and pioneers of the 'Groupe de Recherche Musicale', he is recognized to be alongside P. Schaeffer and P. Henry, one of the great masters of concrete music. He is also among the first to influence the 'musique concrète' with elements from other fields of electronic and acoustic music. Educated by Honegger and Messiaen, some steps, as an example the research work in Darmstadt or in Colony or the crucial meeting with Varèse, remain however fundamental. From Varèse, above all, Ferrari learned a fundamental lesson in his search: to consider and to accept the sounds 'for themselves'. The sounds must retain their own original identity, as an abstract quality. This has then been inserted in works in which the sound folds towards a form of narrative, and towards something, eventually, that has been called 'an imaginary musical story'. In this 'story' voices, sounds, orchestral sound, magnetic tape reach levels of extraordinary elaboration and effectiveness. Besides his work in the electronic and electro-acoustic area, Ferrari has composed instrumental music, ranging from solo for pianoforte, to works for orchestra that have obtained wide recognition. We also cannot forget his works for radio and television. As some have suggested, Luc Ferrari among many 'excellent' researchers holds an important position, because of his peculiar training, not academic, often ironic, that he declares to be characterized by 'intelligence, sensuality, extreme sonorous realism, not serious analytic ability, attention to social and the love for the good kitchen'. With recent publications with some labels (Tzadik by J.Zorn or Blue Chopsticks by D. Grubbs) L. Ferrrari is enjoying a deserved 'rebirth'). In the Milan concert L. Ferrari performed with Erikm, one of the most interesting musicians to work with new technologies."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Interrupteur/Tautologos 3
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 001CD

1999 release, repressed; the debut release on Dave Grubbs's reissue-oriented label (moving forward from where Dexter's Cigar left off). "Ferrari -- along with Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, François Bayle, and others -- is one of the pioneers of the particular style of tape music known as 'musique concrète'. More significantly, he must be counted as one of the most complexly, most idiosyncratically compelling of post-War composers. Ferrari has time and again ranged far afield of musique concrète, and Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 is one such foray into instrumental music. But what a setting-forth! Mon dieu! These particular realizations came about through Ferrari's directed improvisations of Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble, and the recordings were originally released in 1970 by EMI in their 'Perspectives Musicales' series. 'Interrupteur' is largely static music, a music of long tones periodically interrupted by aleatoric events. If it references musical minimalism (particularly Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Robert Ashley), this surely counts as an intuitive, very personal result. 'Tautologos 3' pursues the idea of the superposition of cycles of different lengths that, once set into motion, will continually result in new events. Conventionally understood, a tautology is a redundancy in which the same meaning is expressed in different works; the same things are 'said' repeatedly in 'Taulologos 3', but as the context shifts through the displacement of the various cycles, how could there be no gain, no furtherance of both logic and sensation? In a world: exhilarating.""Interrupteur" is from 1967 and features the following instrumentation: English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello, two percussions, two electric organs. It is one of the most outright powerful and devastating recordings within the avant garde realm. "Tautologos 3" is form 1970 and features: flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, viola, cello, double bass, electric guitar, electric organ & vibraphone.

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Cycle Des Souvenirs (1995-2000)
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 008CD

First ever release of a large scale electroacoustic piece five years in the making that revisits numerous periods from Ferrari's five decades of work. From the composer's liner notes: "I have been composing a new series of works under the general title Exploitation des Concepts. The point is to take concepts I have been experimenting with throughout my entire life as a composer, and to put them to use in every possible direction: in instrumental as well as electroacoustic music, in video, in multimedia installation, in new technologies as well as old ones.... These Exploitations go in all directions: the Tautology, superimposed cycles, the minimalism of the Presque Rien series, architectures of chance, anecdote, narrative, everyday sounds, arte povera . . . souvenirs . . . etc. -- all these concepts that have always preoccupied me but which until now I hadn't really exploited. So we find images of my childhood, my street, my subway; places I passed through and which struck me enough to record them, certain villages in Italy or the sea in Portugal; of my present, too: workplaces, my souvenirs, my house. The Cycle des Souvenirs also means that all the elements are structured in cycles which, when superimposed, produce chance encounters." -- Luc Ferrari.

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Far-West News (Episodes 2 and 3)
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 016CD

"Far-West News is the late Luc Ferrari's three-part aural travelogue of time that he and his wife Brunhild Meyer spent in the American Southwest in 1998. Far-West News strains familiar categories of genre; as Ferrari himself writes, 'It's not a report or a soundscape, not a Hörspiel or an electronic work, not a portrait or a recorded reality exhibit, not a transgression of reality or an Impressionist account, not a so on or so forth. It's a composition....[C]omposition in some cases, especially in mine, and increasingly in my life, is a perverted game with the truth.' There you go. File under 'perverted game.' Far-West News is constructed from field recordings, narration, and overlaid electronic music fragments. The electronic interruptions read as representations of musical accompaniment that likely existed in Luc Ferrari's brain to keep things interesting -- herky-jerky musical phrases are slathered ex post facto atop the sounds of a foundry, a Garth Brooks-ish singer-songwriter, a walk in Death Valley. These David Lynchian sonic interruptions of the everyday have a found object quality that's central to Far-West News. There's a steady macro-rhythm of cars passing along the highway, recalling the basso continuo of the train in Glenn Gould's The Idea of North. In his dual role as composer and tape editor, Luc Ferrari had a supreme knack for musicalizing the comedy of linguistic confusion. Luc and Brunhild, Far-West News's main characters, treat locals and yokels alike -- with exquisite visitor-hospitality. Lewis and Clark, meet Bouvard and Pécuchet. This could be a case study in cross-cultural sociality. Far-West News takes place during the lead-up to the Clinton impeachment -- innocent time -- and Lewinsky looms over the landscape. It's all punctuated by Luc's laugh. Far-West News, like Ferrari's classic Presque Rien No. 1, is a work of landscape. Where Presque Rien No. 1 presented a landscape wiped of speech, Far-West News revels in the locals' voices and their choice of words."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Acousmatrix - History of Electronic Music III
Label:	BVHAAST (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	BVHAAST 9009

Third volume in the Acousmatrix series. "A lovely work of electro-acoustic music by one of the French pioneers of musique concrete, Petite Symphonie Intuitive Pour un Paysage de Printemps ('Little Intuitive Symphony for a Spring Landscape') recreates the composer's experiences during a climb toward sunset on the Causse Mejean, a high plateau in the Massif Central, including his recollection of a shepherd's flute and its reverberations across the landscape. The flute sounds and multiple echoes continue in changing musical modes throughout the piece (the tonic redefined by electronic drones), blending together with sounds of the countryside and conversational fragments from the human presence to create a beautiful sonic landscape of 25 minutes duration. 'Heterozygote' is a musique concrete composition realized on tape; it combines fragments of conversations and other sounds and noises from nature and daily life in an organized and poetic manner (although not plot-oriented). Bits of human speech in several languages are used both for their charm of meaning and their musical qualities of inflection and pitch. At one moment several people express how much they enjoyed having visited some unnamed place. At another moment a mysterious transformed voice chants 'dans un reve' (in a dream), but the accompanying sounds are more like the real creaks and crashes of a house in a windy storm, with intermittent disturbed cries from the sleeper. For the first time in a musique concrete work, the sounds are modulated and transformed but retain their natural character; the result is not abstract, but rather moves about the world with the ease of a thought or a dream. In the 'Presque Rien' (Almost Nothing) series of musique concrete pieces, Ferrari further developed this technique and sensibility with sounds and their interconnections that are almost unidentifiable, while nevertheless retaining a feeling of naturalness." --Blue Gene Tyranny, AMG

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Et Tournent Les Sons
Label:	CESARE (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	CESARE 06/03/4

"Performed by Ensemble Laborintus: Hélène Breschand: harp. Philippe Cornus: percussions. Sylvain Kassap: clarinets. Adeline Lecce: cello. Franck Masquelier: flutes. Plus: eRikm: CD player on 'Archives sauvées des eaux.' 01.'Et tournent les sons dans la garrigue (1977) (Réflexion sur l'écriture n°1).' ('and sounds are spinning in the garigue') For tape and instrumental ensemble. The idea here is to propose a score of intentions and desires of sound -- a tape part that indicates materials, forms and general ideas that combine to create meaning. Communication among the musicians is key as they choose the way they realize or 'invent' the piece. 02. 'Archives sauvées des eaux (2000-2005) (Exploitation des concepts n°3).' ('Archives rescued from the waters (exploitation of concepts #3).' Version for two CDs and instrumental ensemble. Two CDs contain sequences over which the instruments improvise -- little bits of magnetic memory rescued from a flood. The ensemble must stay together, but can otherwise do as it pleases, occasionally slipping in quotes from Patajaslocha, a dance suite composed in 1984. This version was prepared with Luc Ferrari during the summer of 2005. He was to perform the CD's part himself, but he passed away six days before the recording."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Tautologos and Other Early Electronic Works
Label:	ELECTRONIC MUSIC FOUNDATION
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	EMF 037CD

"Luc Ferrari is among the best-known of the early electronic music pioneers. He was director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales from 1959 to 1960, working closely with Pierre Schaeffer, and his music played a decisive role in defining the range of musique concrete. But he went further to become one of the most radical composers of his time, and this CD, with its incisive character and exceptional sounds, marks the starting point for his artistic evolution. The compositions include 'Etudes aux accidents I Study on accidents' (1958), 'Etudes aux sons tendus / Study on stretched sounds'(1958), 'Visages V / Appearance V (1959), 'Tate et queue du dragon I Head and tail of the dragon' (1960), 'Tautokgos 1(1961), 'Tautologos 2' (1961), 'Und so weiter! And so much further' (1966, with Gerard Fremy, pianist)."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Presque Rien
Label:	INA GRM (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	INA 2008

A series of early Ferrari works for magnetic tape (previously issued on Wergo and DGG in the LP era). "Presque Rien No. 1" is a piece from 1970, a work that he referred to as "poor man's concrete music," in that it was not heavily edited or manipulated, but is fascinating in its success in creating a "harmonious architecture resulting from a secretly methodical use of polyphony." "Presque Rien No. 2" is almost an ambient-environmental work: the sounds of crickets and other insects, eventually building into "a nightmarish frenzy of storm and rain, and an insistent beating of electronic notes." "Music Promenade" was realized in 1969 for 4 magnetic tapes, each comprising different recordings, played simultaneously on 4 separate tape recorders, and a truly successful head blower. Definitely one of the key INA CD releases. "So much musique concrete was interchangeable, but Ferrari was the medium's poet, and Presque Rien (Almost Nothing No. 1) the genre's classic, a recorded day at the seaside enhanced so subtly that it's a virtual extension of '4'33"...the other concreters string noises together, but Ferrari paints situational tone-pictures so lifelike you want to creep into the loudspeaker to see what's going on." -- Kyle Gann

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Volume 1: Chansons Pour Le Corps
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 081CD

2007 remastered reissue version; originally released in 1999. Includes "Chansons Pour Le Corps" (1988-94; for voice, clarinets, percussion, piano and synthesizer; Elise Caron, voice), and "Et Si Tout Entière Maintenant" (1986-87; symphonic tale for voice, orchestral sound and tape; with texts by Collette Fellous; Anne See, voice; Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique; Yves Prin, conductor). "The works on this disc show a combination of Ferrari's musique concrete and instrumental styles. The point of departure for 'Chansons Pour Le Corps' was a series of spontaneous interviews with women on the subject of female form which Ferrari recorded in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It's a great image, a young woman out for a Sunday afternoon stroll approached by a man wondering if she might allow him to record her talking about various intimate parts of her body. The interviewees were invited to speak about their eyes, hands, breasts and sex, and those who accepted did so with extraordinary candor. Novelist and radio presenter Colette Fellous was then asked to write texts based on the tapes to be set for soprano and ensemble interspersed with extracts from the original interviews. 'Et Si Tout Entière Maintenant' a 'symphonic tale' for voice, orchestral sound and tape is an extraordinary work. The orchestral score was performed, recorded and then treated electronically in his studio, though the orchestra is never deformed beyond all recognition. This is incorporated into the piece along with the authentic sounds of the Swedish icebreaker and its crew, and Fellous' spoken text. What results is typical Ferrari genre blending, inhabiting a region somewhere between fact and fiction, documentary and poetry, orchestral and electronic music."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Les Anecdotiques
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	SR 207CD

"Even if his art is historically linked to the musique concrète school, Luc Ferrari (born in Paris in 1929) is above all a man with a freedom of spirit rarely equalled in the history of music, who has repeatedly left what he excelled at for new territory still unexplored; thus he is par excellence the composer of new fields of investigation. Ferrari joined the Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1958 and remained a member until 1966; he collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in setting up the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1958). By 1963-4 he had begun Hétérozygote, an extended tape piece in which ambient sounds unfold in narrative form, suggesting a dazzling variety of incidents, all unexplained. He was Professor of Composition at Cologne's Rheinische Musikschule from 1964 to 65. In 1965 and 1966 he produced Les Grandes Répétitions, a series of television documentaries with Gérard Patris on the subject of contemporary music, specifically Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hermann Scherchen and Cecil Taylor. Luc Ferrari's diverse work and aesthetics continue to have a singular impact on the young generations of electronic musicians and artists. The corpus of his work is immense and includes hundreds of compositions of all kinds. Les Anecdotiques -- his last composition -- is a vast sound-film of more than an hour who explores in 15 steps the intensity of re-composed sounds from his continual travel around the world -- with electronic additional structures."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Son Mémorisé
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	SR 252CD

This is the second of three Sub Rosa releases of instrumental works by this important artist. Luc Ferrari is considered one of the most legendary musical figures of the twentieth century, whose work and aesthetic continues to influence several generations of contemporary composers. Director of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales which he established with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris from 1958-1966, he is also one of the masters of musique concrète who influenced and expanded the genre with electro-acoustic instrumentation. Right from the start, the idea had been to release three very different CDs: one hörspiel, one of concrete music (new and older pieces) and one CD of instrumental works. Les Anecdotiques was the first step: a vast sound-film of more than an hour that explores in 15 steps the intensity of re-composed sounds from his continual travel around the world, with electronic additional structures. This album is the second step -- one that offers a retrospective -- the previously unreleased "Promenade Symphonique dans un Paysage Musical" from 1976-78, the final "Presque Rien #4" and a fresh reflection dating from the last months of 2002, "Saliceburry Cocktail," a large-scale composition exploring the idea of hideout, scrambled listening -- a tortuous entanglement of concrète and electronic. The forthcoming third and final release will be three recent instrumental compositions for electronics, piano and viola which were recorded under Luc's supervision -- the last works he ever recorded, as he passed away in August 2005.

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Didascalies
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	CD/DVD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	SR 261CD

This is a new version of Didascalies, previously released as SR 259CD. This version has the same music as SR 259CD, but with new cover artwork, plus a bonus DVD disc (European PAL-format only, sorry). Didascalies is the last release in Sub Rosa's three-part series of instrumental works by this important artist, now packaged with a DVD featuring Luc Ferrari at work on this -- his last experiment. Luc Ferrari is considered one of the most legendary musical figures of the twentieth century, whose work and aesthetic continues to influence several generations of contemporary composers. Director of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales which he established with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris from 1958-1966, he is also one of the masters of musique concrète who influenced and expanded the genre with electro-acoustic instrumentation. Right from the start, the idea had been to release three very different CDs: one hörspiel, one of concrete music (new and older pieces) and one CD of instrumental works. Les Anecdotiques was the first step: a vast sound-film of more than an hour that explores in 15 steps the intensity of re-composed sounds from his continual travels around the world, with additional electronic structures. Son Mémorisé was a retrospective of concrète and electronic compositions. Didascalies brings together "Rencontres Fortuites," "Didascalies" and "Tautologos III" -- two recent works for piano, viola and electronics, and one open-ended work -- which featured at a concert at the Boendael Chapel in Brussels. A few months later, this release was assembled with Ferrari's supervision at the legendary Brème studios with final development at La Muse en Circuit. This release also documents the composition of a new version of "Tautologos," Ferrari's last recorded piece, with woven piano and viola breaking down, starting anew in an opposite direction with bandoneon, DX7 and books being closed every two and a half minutes. About a month later, Luc Ferrari passed away. Performed by Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven (piano) and Vincent Royer (viola).

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Cellule 75
Label:	TZADIK
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TZ 7033

"Irreverent, psychosexual and always fascinating, Ferrari's work manifests itself in texts, instrumental textures, electroacoustic compositions, reportings, films, theatre, etc. It is an honor for Tzadik to release two of his most important works from the 1970s, recorded under the supervision of the composer himself. 'Place des Abbesses,' the first electro acoustic portrait work realized at his home studio in Paris, 1977, is an evocative portrait of a small square between The Sacred Heart of God and Saints and the Pigalle of licentiousness and sex, two familiar Ferrari obsessions. 'Cellule 75' is an explosive, dynamic work for piano, percussion and tape, balancing improvisational spontaneity with the more exacting writing of classical forms."

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