Group of the Electronic Music Studio of McGill: Vox Machina.(Review)

Group of the Electronic Music Studio of McGill: Vox Machina

Compact disc (enhanced), 1999; McGill Systems, Inc., 550 Sherbrooke Street West, Suite 990, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B9, Canada; telephone (514) 398-4477; fax (514) 398-4488; electronic mail mus@msi.mcgill.ca; World Wide Web www.msi.mcgill.ca

The latest release from GEMS (Group of the Electronic Music Studio of McGill), Vox Machina, includes compositions from five composers with different philosophies about composing in the electronic music medium. With this third recording, the group combines quality musical compositions with multimedia presentations to fully exploit the potential of computers in music.

The first work on the recording is Michael Picton's Ouvertures II. This piece features percussion and electroacoustic sounds. It is an elaboration on his 1991 composition, Ouvertures, and involves the superimposition of D'Arcy Gray's percussion over the tape of manipulated samples of Chinese cymbals, church bells, bowed bells, and rattling keys. For the first three minutes the taped samples give the piece a transcendental quality, much like what one might expect in a film about a supernatural or extraterrestrial world. The live percussion meshes perfectly and serves to enhance the mood rather than to create a new one. In my opinion the piece could have ended there and would have been complete. The final two minutes seem unconnected and anticlimactic. This portion features mainly electronic sounds and rattling keys, which sound like the tinkling of wind chimes. The live percussion is absent from this section except for a final blow at the end.

The second, and most unique, piece is Raymond Luk's Semiotic Rifle. This work sounds more like the soundtrack for a 3D shooter game, for example, Doom or Quake, than it does a musical composition. It gives the impression of walking through hostile territory, alert to every footstep, clink, beep, or voice. Periodically, Mr. Luk breaks (or perhaps enhances) the tension by inserting group laughter into the work. The tension escalates as the track progresses through a climactic battle scene, complete with helicopters and machine gun fire, before returning to a highly suspenseful silence, penetrated only by occasional beeps and breathing. In the words of the composer, the sudden end of this piece is "often the last thing you ever hear."

The third composition on the recording, James Harley's Night Flowering ... Not Even Sand II, takes its name from fragments of poems by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and is one of the two pieces in which the computer figures heavily in the composition. Mr. Harley formulated the tape using four instruments created from synthesis algorithms in Csound: a harp-like sound, a bell-like sound, a bass sound, and a buzz. The score was developed using the output from compositional algorithms produced by the composer's own CHAOTICS software. The result initially sounds somewhat random, but with careful attention one can clearly identify an underlying structure. While this piece may not appeal to a wide ...