"UFO Forest +" is the third and most alchemically satisfying archival anthology of unreleased material from the Argentinian composer, building on a growing recognition of her poetic, psychosonic investigations ongoing since her studies in the early 60's with Nadia Boulanger and Edgardo Canton, and at the renowned Parisian institute INA-GRM.
In three longform parts and one vignette, she projects hallucinatory designs for the imagination, oscillating from the shearing vortices of the magnificent title piece to the sharp plunge into Amazonian ritual on "Vuelo de signos y remolinos", and out to planes of sci-fi dread, ecstasy and chaos on "Cercles des ronde". Collected, they speak to a unique grasp of unruly dynamics, right on the cusp of natural wildness, and an ability to develop ideas from kernels of sound that blossom into cataclysmic events.
"Cercles Des Rondes" is especially unsettling and surreal; a longer, darker composition, it brings a new level of drama to the anthology, including a deliriously doomed synth fanfare and robotic voices, dissolved into blaring surrealism when Ferreyra starts to add corrupted electro-acoustic elements.
It's a genuinely rare pleasure to inhabit any of Ferreyra's immersive works, and never more so than on this set, which feels a bit like peering down a telescope fixed on just one tiny sliver of a cosmic multiverse, or like looking at a vast, luminscent tapestry in the dark with a flashlight.
"I'm not really sure when I first heard Beatriz Ferreyra's music. My best guess would be in the early to mid 2000s when I was working alongside the curatorial team at Liquid Architecture. Given the focus of the festival at that time, GRM and musique concrète more generally was very much a point of focus.
That said, it wasn't until this decade that her work was sharply in focus for me (and I am guessing a great many others). In 2017, I had the great pleasure to meet Beatriz in Braga, where we both were performing as part of the excellent Semibreve Festival. Subsequent to that I invited her to perform in Australia and we also had the pleasure to send time together in Rio during the Novas Frequencies Festival. Across these meetings, I have come to realise the incredible focus, generosity and vision that Beatriz has maintained across her life in sound.
Beatriz Ferreyra is one of only a handful of female concrète composers who were active across the second half of the 20th century through to today. Her work, which is still very much an active investigation, is simultaneously complex and elegantly simple. Often drawing upon singular object of focus, Ferreyra's use of tape and other forms of manipulation radically reconfigure her chosen sound materials, opening them outward.
UFO Forest + collects together works from both her practices in tape based music and also computer based works. The pieces featured here epitomise her prowess in create dynamically rich sound works that are effortless in their sense of otherworldliness. Beatriz Ferreyra has created a sonic terrain all her own, and here is lies the proof."
Lawrence EnglishBeatriz Ferreyra (born 1937 in Cordoba, Argentina) has been at the forefront of
electroacoustic music composition since 1963 when she joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as one of
Pierre Schaeffer's research assistants. She is one of very few composers still performing who was instrumental at the beginning of Schaeffer's theories of
sound objects and
reduced listening techniques. She continues to compose commissioned works and perform around the world in a career that has spanned some sixty years.
From the 1960s until 1997 Beatriz Ferreyra composed tape pieces for multi-speaker performance using three or four Revox reel-to-reel tape machines at each concert. She now works on Pro Tools with GRM plug-ins but still uses the Revoxes for certain tape techniques that can't be achieved with computer software. Beatriz Ferreyra discusses her music in the Schaefferian way, as a series of impulsions [sharp attacks], iteratives [repetitions], percutés [percussive hits], and trames [sustains] whilst also using her own onomatopoeic descriptions such as ‘schkllang, prrrrwip, ferrrwisssssh, takatak' communicating sounds freely and directly as she hears them. Her music is about movement; the movement of sounds around a performance space, or the positioning of sounds as point sources within the illusory stereo field between loudspeakers. It is also about movement within individual sounds, where each one is a composition of different shifting components and a ‘little structure' in its own right, with its own character. She likens her sounds to a Russian doll, inside each is another one, which contains another, and so on.
During her time at Schaeffer's studios, Beatriz Ferreyra developed her own research project,
Objets Construits, (constructed objects). These are layers of short sounds, chords made of different noises. Each layer is isolated on a separate piece of tape to analyse the relationships between components and the effect of minimal alterations in pitch, dynamics or timing, to the overall perception of the chord. This was a way of thinking about sound slowly and patiently, of taking time to experiment, analyse and contemplate each manipulation, that is lost in the speedy world of vast ready-made digital sound libraries and the immediacy of save and recall buttons.
In Beatriz Ferreyra's work, small, playful sounds interact like chattering creatures and merge into vast cavernous and mysterious immersive landscapes. These three signature pieces use snippets of speech which are gradually deconstructed to create abstract textures, interweaving vocals with percussive and sustained sounds. Small, playful sounds interact like chattering creatures and merge into vast cavernous and mysterious immersive landscapes.
La Baballe du Chien Chien [The doggie's little ball] (2001) is a playful take on the way that we speak in a childlike way to pets. A brief narrative at the start invites the listener into this ‘pet speak' scene, with the sound of footsteps and chatter. These gradually crescendo and morph into a cacophonous swirling explosion.
Deux Dents Dehors [two teeth sticking out] (2007) is a pun on Bernard Parmegiani's piece
Dedans Dehors [Inside Outside] (1977), composed for his birthday. It takes snippets of lively vernacular and processes these into complex patterns of unintelligible and unrecognisable speech, in sustained or percussive sequences and glissandi.
Heullas Entreveradas (2018) is a new commission that transforms vocal sounds into choral textures which fragment, granulate and transform into continuous whorls and tidal washes interspersed with her trademark short silences.
