专辑简介

by François Couture

This CD is a reissue of Wishart's 1977 LP, Red Bird, augmented by his piece "Anticredos" from Singcircle's 1982 LP, Mouth Music. Both works feature some of the composer's most striking music, but they belong to two very different realms. "Red Bird" is a 45-minute piece of musique concrète in four movements. Made for the most part of bird sounds, body sounds, and selected mouthed words, it weaves an intricate network of symbols. Completed in 1977, it was made with traditional electro-acoustic techniques. It has a crude tape splicing aspect that aged surprisingly well. Often brutal in its contrasts, it presents interesting sound transformations, but most of all a dense, relentless abstract drama that compares very well to Pierre Henry's best works from the '60s and '70s. The result of four years of work, "Red Bird" is a significant work and conveys ideas of imprisonment and freedom that are beautifully expressed. "Anticredos" dates from 1982. It involves no electronics at all; it is a live performance by the experimental vocal group Singcircle. Wishart scored the piece for six voices, using extended techniques to expand, so to speak, the word "credos." Often the listener is tempted to believe there are electro-acoustic manipulations involved, but on close-up inspection it turns out Wishart simply found ways to make real voices perform sound morphings that some musique concrète composers used to work on relentlessly in the days before the computer age.