John Oswald: Aparanthesi: reviews

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Aparanthesi

John Oswald

Aparanthesi

empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 0368 | 2003

CD 25.00 CA$ [?]

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Review

by Grant Chu Covell in La Folia (USA), March 1, 2005 |6004|

“The slow-moving layers create indeterminate hybrids rich in harmonics, and Oswald intuitively blends electronics with real-world sound.”

Plunderphonic’s instigator offers two glacially moving compositions, ostensibly two sides of the same coin. Each work begins with a thunderbolt multi-octave A that triggers long cross-fades and slow morphs. Both are parallel paths through the same landscape. Each piece is tuned to match American and European electricity’s pervasive hum, though this doesn’t completely account for their differing durations. (This inequality points to a prospective fascination with the pair: It’s hard to determine whether one is merely the sped-up version of the other.)

A Yamaha Disklavier piano contributes the source material’s bulk, but there’s also weather, a surreptitiously captured piano tuner at work, Joan Jeanrenaud’s cello, and birds. These aparanthesi progress gradually and deviously. You may frequently pause the disc to isolate that low rumbling (an idling truck or Oswald?) or that lightly spluttering sound (a running tap or Oswald?). Rarely does ea blot and mask the listener’s environment so well. The slow-moving layers create indeterminate hybrids rich in harmonics, and Oswald intuitively blends electronics with real-world sound. Audiophiles need to know that Oswald’s kit contains potentially nasty effects: cone flapping and extreme dynamic fluctuations. empreintes DIGITALes’ always elegant presentation (nested layers which must be unfolded to reach the disc) includes a lengthy composer interview.


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Review

by Ingvar Loco Nordin in Sonoloco Record Reviews (Sweden), January 15, 2005 |903|

“This is a magnificent piece of fundamental research. I think we will give John Oswald a strong A for it!”

Chris Cutler wrote that John Oswald’s Aparanthesi is a meditation on listening — and it couldn’t be better said. That is the true nature of this piece, which, to begin with, may startle the average listener to the point of giving up… because what is it that you hear? Oswald supplies the longest liner notes I’ve ever seen, in an interview by Norman Igma — and I must say I found reading them quite useful, because the text sharpened and tuned my listening to certain properties and qualities that I otherwise may have missed, while all the while listening for something that isn’t there, instead of hearing what’s up front!

Still, this work — in it’s two versions — demands something of the listener. I wouldn’t call it easy listening… and perhaps you have to be in the business to really enjoy this more than a scientific experiment, a laboratory show-off. Knowing John Oswald’s approach to sound, though, I know his intentions are pure and honest — and we may extend our gratitude to empreintes DIGITALes who doesn’t shy away from issuing marginal releases from time to time, i.e. highly specialized ventures that probably won’t bring in a lot of funds, but which cast new light on the art of listening, the nature of sound.

One composer who unfolded the nature of sound already in the early 1950s — and who has never stopped — is Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose courses in Kuerten — and his seminars at those courses (usually amounting to about 18 CDs worth of talks each year!) — I’ve attended for a number of years as the official photographer, has made a distinction between seeing a number of objects in a constant lighting versus observing the same object under changing lightings… and he would be the right person to make the comparison, too, the way I’ve seen him work with both sound and light during endless rehearsals…

The key point is that we have to listen in a new way — a different way — to a work like Aparanthesi. The old, homey standards do not fit; they’re useless here, in which everything that happens at first does not appear to happen — since we’re naturally attuned to listen in a way that signifies an anticipation for what is not there; an elusive Godot that never shows up. We have to wish ourselves, with John Cage, Happy New Ears — and once we’ve got them, once we’ve ridded ourselves of forced concepts, we can truly enjoy Aparanthesi — and consequently other audibilities that we perhaps were not aware of before. I can compare it to my way of hearing birds before and after I turned an ornithologist. Before I just heard a maze of chirps, and after I could distinguish, I knew who was saying what, and I could, with my inner sight, envision beautiful plumages and migration paths and so forth; a new dimension of bird chirps! Anyway, the Stockhausen distinction above works fine concerning Oswald’s Aparanthesi, in which he works with a single pitch, the A, in version one at 440 kHz, in version B 480 kHz, i.e. the pitch of the electric current in the United States, from wirings, household appliances and so forth.

In Aparanthesi Oswald runs a number of sonic events or objects through the A mill, tuning a variety of sound sources — piano, cello, birds, cows, thunderstorms, wind and whatnot — to an A, tinkering with the overtone spectra, morphing the sounds in a way so that you really can’t say for sure exactly when a cow becomes wind or the piano a cello…

Oswald has calculated that it would be decent to assume that there are ten audible octaves, which is why he works with ten degrees of the A; dire dynamics! The composer investigates the possible varieties possible deduced from the single pitch A. Perhaps you could call it fundamental research!

He utilizes tow real world musicians for the piano and the cello, while all other sounds are derived from recordings of a variety of sounds; really any sound at all you can imagine, like birds and storms and voices — all naturally or synthetically tuned to an A.

When listening, be aware of the serious dynamics, because you may want to increase the volume dangerously when the level slips to the lower limit of hearing, volumewise or pitchwise, but then the sound may be so incredibly forceful and low-pitched that it will threaten your speakers. There are instances of cone flapping, so take it cautiously!

This is truly unfamiliar music to most of us, but why not compare it to the experience or theoretical experience of Rigpa, the state before all states in Tibetan Buddhism, that clear state of mind that can be likened to the sight of a starry sky as the clouds move away, that original state of consciousness out of which all thought-forms and consequent objects arise, and into which they sink back — like all sounds rise out of their original state of silence, into which they’re bound to sink; ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and silence to silence…

This is a magnificent piece of fundamental research. I think we will give John Oswald a strong A for it!


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Critique

by Paul-Yves Bourand in Revue & Corrigée #61 (France), September 1, 2004 |877|

“Du grand art qui emporte l’adhésion. Fascinant.”

Biographie: coupable de tailler avec affront des costumes dans les œuvres des autres, pour les remonter ensuite à sa guise sans leurs accords, tout en conservant à ses emprunts un aspect reconnaissable. Multirécidiviste, s’est attiré les faveurs (et les foudres) de quelques tribunaux, suite aux plaintes d’épiciers dont nous tairons les noms afin de leur épargner toute publicité gratuite. Sur commande, s’est également livré à un hommage au groupe Grateful Dead (Grayfolded), d’excellente facture.

Mais que peuvent donc avoir en commun les locataires d’une volière, un anonyme accordeur de piano, la violoncelliste Joan Jeanrenaud (ex-manieuse d’archet du Kronos Quartet) et les grondements d’un orage précédant une pluie battante? Selon le metteur en ondes, de produire des vibrations de l’air aux alentours de 440 Hertz, le fameux la qui fait vrombir d’un même accord instrumentistes et vocalistes des pays occidentaux.

L’album se divise en deux longues plages qui prennent les formes de vagues sonores que l’on dirait filmées au ralenti. Celles-ci enflent, enflent, enflent, puis s’abattent et se répandent interminablement sur la grève jusqu’à leur dernière goutte (le silence). Avant que ne se produisent ces (fatales?) échéances, Oswald joue sur tous les registres des superpositions, entrelacements, juxtapositions, émiettant ses sources en des myriades de sons qui peuvent n’être qu’à peine perceptibles. De curieuses mues qu’une écoute distraite parvient à confondre en un bourdonnement uni et apaisant.

Pépiements, bruissements d’ailes et de feuillages, stridulations d’insectes, vol d’un moustique, ruissellements et souffles, crissements des chevilles quand la clef de l’accordeur les fait tourner dans leur sommier, vibrato obstiné de violoncelle, appel sourd d’une corne de brume, tous subissent peu ou prou quelques modulations hertziennes à l’aide de l’effet Doppler. Une mise en perspective des tâtonnements qui s’opèrent avant d’obtenir l’accord parfait.

Pour ce travail de longue haleine (en gros, trois ans de charcutages et de remises en cause) John Oswald a fait appel tant à ses réminiscences cinématographiques qu’à ses trouvailles antérieures (notamment sur Discosphere). La longue interview (insérée dans le livret) que le compositeur accorde à Norman Igma lui permet de revenir sur toutes les étapes qui furent franchies pour atteindre le résultat final. Le lecteur y apprend ainsi que certains motifs ont été effacés ou sont devenus inaudibles pour toute autre personne que l’artisan, mais leurs présences demeurent en négatif.

Des propos qui ne font que renforcer la stupéfaction qu’avec des matériaux aussi disparates (voire d’une banalité confondante), il est possible de rejoindre les papes de la musique minimaliste ou répétitive. Du grand art qui emporte l’adhésion. Fascinant.

P.S.: Dommage qu’aucune puissance divine n’existe, elle aurait sûrement aimé saisir l’occasion pour intenter plusieurs procès retentissants quant au sort que fait l’agenceur à quelques unes des créatures qui lui servent d’ingrédients.


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Review

by John Keillor in Opus #27:03 (Canada), September 1, 2004 |870|

“… Oswald has sublimated his joker’s energy into this work of rare nocturnal intimacy.”

Three years in the making, John Oswald’s new digital composition Aparanthesi smirks less than much of this Toronto composer’s notoriously impish output. It soberly blends both electronic with musique concrète, exploring the single note A in two half-hour episodes, during which the As overtones are gently, continually re wrought: a pianos’ open octave gradually becomes a pure sine wave, then gradually a cello, and so on. There’s a foghorn appearance, as well as a moment of monks singing.

Along this timbral journey theres always action, in the form of overtone tinkering; each sound’s fundamentals are re-jigged to evoke new sounds. An attractive spillage of static and the wraith-like remains of sound waves seem to be ever circling the basic aural centre: the mooing of cows becomes the buzz of mosquitoes accompanied by radio static and spinning coins. The compositions two sections illuminate two approaches to two distinct As. The A of Aparanthesi A is pitched at 440 khz, the musical tuning A, while the A of Aparanthesi B is pitched to 480 khz, which is the electrical tone emitted by toasters, computers, and other normally non-musical appliances.

Both halves of this composition have a comparable fluttery of mysteriousness. The ideas behind their separate points of departure are scrupulously detailed in the disc’s unusually long program notes, wherein the only performance credit goes to cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, whose playing is engineered beyond any meaningful critique. But the recording’s overall soundscape is consistently impeccable, nelther glossy net sloppy, even at very low levels. The tiniest sounds are always leading the listener somewhere. The only flaw in the production is that cranking up the stereo is often necessary when Aparanthesi drops to near-silence.

This is not background music: unless concentrating, casual listeners wili miss about 95 percent of the material, which is often just a patient rustle of overtones shuffled around. But once its audience hones in, the subtly evolving colours captivate. Both sections have a dramatic arc, cast through degrees of sound density (more density creates more material to muck around with) as well as a few well-prepared contrasts. In this regard, those singing monks shine, as does Oswald, who has sublimated his joker’s energy into this work of rare nocturnal intimacy. In a medium saturated with straining academia, Aparanthesi is not only superior in its electro-idiomatic acuity, but it is also direct and unpretentious.


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Review

by Nilan Perera in Exclaim! (Canada), June 23, 2004 |883|

“… I was as intent on hearing the next event as I would be in reading the next page of an amazing novel.”

The thing about John Oswald’s music that has always impressed me is that it is, quite simply, masterful. The sheer completeness of his individual works is something quite startling in and of itself: nothing, in my opinion, could possibly be subtracted or added. If you were to ask me about the “plundered” elements that form the music on this CD, I would say: thunder, the sound of water, single notes out of a piano, ambient drones, whispers and you’d roll your eyes when the new age warning buzzer would instantly go off. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two pieces on this CD total over an hour and they contain all the mystery, power and sheer craft of the very best orchestral classical music I have heard. It was a curious impression, considering the fact that I was listening to a sampled work, but one that kept recurring. My attention was not only kept, but I was as intent on hearing the next event as I would be in reading the next page of an amazing novel. The experience was very much the same. Some of the best plunderphonia to date, from the master himself.


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Oswald is the future of music

by Udo Kasemets in Musicworks (Canada), June 1, 2004 |808|

“… a most extraordinary, imaginative, and intelligent work of sonic art.”

“Perhaps the earliest sound O remembers noticing was the summer cicada. Later there was a dilemma — was the cicada biological or electrical? Where did it come from?” O is none other than John Oswald, and this quote appears early on in An Aparathentic Bio, an autobiographical memoir included in the package containing a compact disc featuring a most extraordinary, imaginative, and intelligent work of sonic art. (Indeed, I could continue with a whole series of alliterative i-words to describe the qualities of the CD: inspired, inquisitive, intimate, inviting, involving, illuminating, informing, and on and on.) When I call it a package, I don’t mean it’s packaging in the commercial sense. Sure, it has an appealing cover design. But that, too, is part of the completeness of the whole presentation. Not only is there one of Oswald’s inimitable (another i-word) photo-images on the exterior of the slide-in case, but there are also hidden images inside the cover tube. The autobiographical notes are printed on the hard covers that protect the CD. And a folded three quarters of a meter-long sheet carries, in small print, two columns of text on each side of an interview where John Oswald discusses in great detail the making and contents of the recording. Nothing of the above is window- dressing. Oswald’s work is never compartmentalized. Every aspect of research, preparation, realization, and presentation is part of a whole. So, when he writes about O’s curiosity about the cicada; or how O explored the innards of a transistor radio to understand its secrets; or how O experimented with the variable speeds of a phonograph and of reel-to-reel tape recorders; Oswald suggests to the reader that intimate involvement (yes, the i-words) with the reality of sounds and their sources is the foundation of any true musical experience. He invites (i-word!) the reader to enter into O’s world, where what appears to be simple and mundane will eventually emerge as intricate (another i-word) and even quite miraculous. Mind you, the music on the CD can be enjoyed without knowing anything about its maker and makings. Its sounds are organized so sensitively, elegantly, and competently, that their pure physicality draws the listener into the soundscape, and holds her or him there until the almost inaudible fadeout which brings both of the pieces on the disc to a close. Any attempt to describe the pieces in the framework of a brief review is doomed to failure. The parting points for the pieces are the most elementary tunings known to anybody with even the most cursory interest in sonic reality. The first Aparanthesi is based on the frequency 440 Hz — the fundamental tuning tone (named ‘A’) of the Western musical system. For the second aporanthesi Oswald chose the North American electrical standard, 60 Hz as its tuning base. As a plain sine tone, or a piano or cello sound (the only two “conventional” instruments employed), their choice may appear utterly mundane. But the commonality disappears when Oswald exploits the numerous variables underwhich these materials can be exhibited. For instance, there is a delicate but definite difference between hearing the piano range’s eight As as struck on the keyboard, and as they are modulated from a single-source A. Oswald describes one of his processes where the eighty-eight keys of a piano are all tuned to one A (“which sounds like a three-inch long guitar”). By “pitching up” or “pitching down” each of the eighty-eight keys one can imagine a “virtual” grand piano that can grow from its initial length of just ten inches to a monster of over one hundred feet. Not only does Oswald tune the sine, piano, and cello tones to the basic pitch (or its multiples) of the piece, but he does the same with the sounds of thunder, birds, foghorns, and cattle. But it is not just the choice of the sounds — synthetic, instrumental, and of nature — that makes listening to the two Aparanthesi such a special experience; it is also John Oswald’s ability to handle the fadings in and out, the blendings and unblendings, and the spacings and timings of the various materials and their combinations with exquisite taste and acoustic sensitivity. In other words, it is the supreme artistry of John Oswald that gives Aparanthesi its uniquely special quality. I suggested earlier that listening to this CD is thoroughly enjoyable even without reading any of the texts included in the package. (By the way, the package is bilingual: An Aparathentic Bio is in French, the interview in English. Nevertheless, much is to be gained by taking time and with O’s formative years and his personality through his own words. It is not an autobiography like most. It is not about “Look what I have achieved”; it is about “Look — everything, even the smallest, the simplest, is interesting.” And the three-meters-long transcript of the descriptive interview provides a wonderful guide to the listener on how to become an informed partner of a musical process from its genesis in the researcher’s mind to the final consummation in the listener’s ear. Every serious music student should spend hours (and days) with Aparanthesi. Elsewhere in this issue of Musicworks I suggest that we are at the end of an era of musical development in Western culture, and that a new era is in the primal stage of its making. If the clarity of mind, intellectual discipline, and aural sensitivity that went into the process of the production of Aparanthesi is an indication of the direction music of the twenty-first century will take, the future is bright.


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Review

by Carl Wilson in Zoilus (Canada), January 10, 2004 |678|

“… two time-stopping compositions…”

Count on Toronto-based Plunderphonics creator Oswald to toss a conceptual grenade through the picture window, with two time-stopping compositions (each one note for a half-hour’s duration) that have John Cage grinning in his grave. As Chris Cutler puts it in his superb review, “a meditation on hearing”—much the way that a lot of the best abstract art has been a meditation on seeing.


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Review

by Chris Cutler in Rer Megacorp (UK), January 1, 2004 |677_5|

“… an indispensable work. Not merely a piece of music… but a meditation on listening.”

(Excuse the length of the review. Summary: Buy it.)

As in his short piece Klangfarbenprobe for the Re Records quarterly many years ago, John here explores in two 30 minute pieces how much variety and structure is obtainable from a single pitch. Western ears are indoctrinated to listen through pitch, to find binding narratives in melody, harmony and their variations, the rest at best is secondary, at worst just colour. The reason so much Baroque music translates so easily to different instruments, including heavy metal guitar, is because it’s the notes that really count. The notes and their ratios and their relationships. Harmony was considered part of a scared mathematics and the relations between pitches expressed absolute, fundamental cosmic realities. Pure music, the music of the spheres related directly to the Platonic forms, the unchanging verities that we can approach but never grasp. That’s why it is the form that matters, the pattern behind the notes, and not the temporary body in which these are clothed. In the age of the Manufacturer and the Usurer - the age of Beethoven and after - while holding to the spiritual in theory, music was progressively seduced by the material. Orchestration came to matter more and more. And once sound recording was invented, the materiality of sound itself became an unegotiable fact. Varese, pre-eminently, relegated notes to a secondary position in his work, pursuing timbre, dynamic, mass, spatiality and contrast, but generally, all the way through to the late 1950s, especially under the sway of post serialism, notes continued to hold their own, even though their grip was slipping. That decade, however, saw two radical responses that recognised and between them reified the dilemma: In the left corner, John Cage shifted his attention to rhythm - which is the organisation of time and which, significantly, is made equally of sound and silence - for him pitch was just material to be poured into structured time; it could be anything - let the sounds be themselves; while, for La Monte Young, in the right corner, pitch became absolutely supreme. John Oswald follows neither route but approaches the problem from a completely different perspective. His work, initially closer to Schönberg’s famous short orchestra piece and Varese’s explorations into dynamic, timbre and spatiality goes beyond these to an exploration of what happens when pitch becomes informationally redundant - or transparent - forcing other qualities of sound to be heard through it, and making thereby what is always missing or suppressed significant. By this simple device - the most original things are always this obvious and one wonders how come it took so long to reach them - the answer is, as always, that it takes a different kind of thinking to see the obvious. By this simple device of removing tonal data by levelling it, John is able to accentuate and make essential parts of hearing we take for granted and, when in art mode, largely ignore. He takes acoustic space, natural and un-natural sound, the outside world and the discourse of music - and by merging and flattening them arrives at strikingly unfamiliar listening aesthetic.

Of course, John’s work with recordings has always been about listening - as well as to a certain extent about perspective, and both concerns are strongly represented here. His method of work involves gradually tuning every sound to a single pitch (an A). There are 10 audible octaves and so 10 degrees of this pitch with which to work. Two human performers are featured, a piano tuner and a cellist, the rest of the material is derived from a library of recorded sounds built up over time - pure sine tones, orchestral instruments playing A’s, voices, environmental sounds: birds, weather, animals, insects, spaces - and so on. It is all - naturally or un-naturally - pitched to an A. This is the material. The second crucial technique employed throughout this piece is morphing: that is, gradually blending one thing into another. A note becomes a storm becomes a flock of birds - think of some of Trevor Wishart’s extraordinary work in this area, except that here the pitch is uniform and the blend can, if desired, be almost imperceptible. A change of object or event becomes simply one of timbres and detail; to morph is effectively to crossfade very slowly. Sounds may gradually turn into one another, or be sunk inside one another like harmonics, to create shifting banks of timbres. An entire aviary of birds winds up at A and A becomes the aether in which they, and everything else, moves.

Because of the variety of sources and the individual recording of them, spatiality moves to the fore; there is much work here with soundscape, interior and exteriority, distance and shape. Such work with scale and reflection and with the sounds of weather and nature inevitably invokes a visual response, and John often speaks in narrative and visual terms in his interview, “it’s raining in the piano,” “a conical clarinet curls into a french horn and then straightens out into a didgeridoo,” “like a giant hummingbird” &c. But because the pitch is constant, our hearing is focused in an entirely unfamiliar way. He quotes Stockhausen’s comparison between the filmic model of seeing a variety of things under a constant light as opposed to seeing the same thing continually under differing lights. Perspective, space and scale permeate this work, in a way I can not refer to any other work. In one section all 88 notes of the piano sound as an A. And how are we to hear this? John in his excellent and comprehensive accompanying interview points out that this could usefully be described as a shift in scale: the piano notes do not change, but the size of the piano does; the lowest note on the keyboard sounding the A would be strung in a 10-inch concert grand, the highest in one over 100 feet long. This is in some ways analogous to the effect of light speeds on length and time: the light is moving at a constant speed while objects shrink and elongate and time stretches and expands.

There are two versions of the piece on this CD, which is an indispensable work. Not merely a piece of music - or a parade of organised sounds - but a meditation on listening.


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Soundcheck Review

by Julian Cowley in The Wire #239 (UK), January 1, 2004 |676_7|

“… a philosophical investigation of identity and correspondence… a meticulously crafted guide to the intricacies of listening.”

In the notes he supplies to shed light on these two versions of Aparanthesi, Canadian sound alchemist John Oswald enthuses over A, the single pitch used to make the piece, and he talks excitedly of the relevant frequencies measured in Hertz. Yet there’s nothing abstract about this remarkable music. On the contrary it engages with some of the countless potential incarnations of that pitch, from a thunderstorm rumbling across a prairie to Joan Jeanrenaud’s Intensely focused sounding of a cello.

The opening A is a monolithic chord, an Ayers Rock (aka Uluru) of an A. Like that Australian landmark, it then appears to change colour in response to changing light and atmospheric conditions. Oswald’s material undergoes more extensive and fundamental change however. Mass, texture, shape, dynamics alter too as one embodiment morphs into another. A piano tuner at work melts into the weather, a foghorn bellows, rain falls, a mosquito whirrs, sine tones drone, an aviary of birds emerges from a low hum, and miraculously flocks to A. Oswald recalls how, as he morphed the sound of wind instruments, he imagined “the physicality of the instrument transforming, so a conical clarinet would curl into a French horn for instance, and then straighten out into a didgeridoo.”

Aparanthesi could be approached as a philosophical investigation of identity and correspondence, or as a meticulously crafted guide to the intricacies of listening. But those options might be unnecessarily arid. High levels of technical skill and fine judgment are invariably accompanied in Oswald’s music by a clearcut sense of dramatic possibilities, and an awareness of tensions that give form to sonic events and radiate from them to involve his audience in active relationships with evolving structures of sound. Even in a piece that gravitates continually and predictably to a single pitch, strange things happen that spark unexpected images and open up unfamiliar spaces. His generous commentary elucidates but doesn’t even begin to exhaust the fascinating metamorphic drama Oswald has discovered in A.


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The Score

by Christopher DeLaurenti in The Stranger (USA), December 24, 2003 |786|

“An eloquently quiet disc…”

[…] Earlier this year, I singled out Wobbly’s Wild Why (Tigerbeat6), a plunderphonic sound collage of hip-hop recordings pinched from the radio, as essential for anyone interested in avant electronics. One of Wobbly’s forebears, plunderphonic progenitor John Oswald, has an intriguing must-hear new release, Aparanthesi (empreintes DIGITALes), which blends delicate sine tones, field recordings, and subtle prepared piano textures. An eloquently quiet disc, savor Aparanthesi on a lonely moonless night.[…]


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Mystical Sounds from One Note

by Robert Everett-Green in The Globe and Mail (Canada), December 18, 2003 |675|

Aparanthesi is a profound and surprisingly dramatic work.”

Ad Reinhardt used to claim that his all black canvases were the last paintings anyone could make. By the same serious/playful reasoning, you could say that John Oswald’s 65-minute Aparanthesi marks the end of the line for recorded composition, because it contains only one note.

But what exactly is one note? Apart from pure sine tones, every sound we hear is a messy conglomerate of vibrations that determine not only the fundamental pitch but also the density and flavour of the sound. They are the reason a mosquito sounds different from a violin, though a recording of either can be tuned electronically to one pitch, or subtly altered until the bug seems to be morphing into the fiddle. Apply that kind of manœuvre over a range of 10 octaves, and throw open the studio door to any and all sounds that can be recorded, and you begin to understand why it took Oswald three years to edit his one-note composition down to two versions of roughly half an hour each.

Aparanthesi is a profound and surprisingly dramatic work. Its open octaves claim a kind of cosmic scale, though many of the constituent sounds are minute, or deliberately camouflaged by other sounds. Each transition remains tethered to the core pitch, which in time takes on the grounding quality of a monotone chant. Even before a group of monks made a cameo appearance in Aparanthesi B, the piece has enacted the unity of motion and stillness, and hearing it can be a mystical experience.

The two versions cleave to two slightly different pitches: 440 kHz (the A used by orchestras and piano tuners) for Aparanthesi A, and 480 kHz (the undertone emitted by electrical equipment) for Aparanthesi B. The second version, originally developed for a live performance, is the more theatrical, and the more revealing about its source materials. Both exploit the ear’s tendency to preserve a fuzzy zone of acceptability around a given pitch. The relationship between “in tune” and “out of tune” fascinates Oswald, who has made several tuning pieces for live and recorded sounds, and whose music celebrates perfection and deviance with equal fervour.

Aparanthesi is ultimately about paying attention, to sounds and their qualities, and to the mysterious interrelation of unity and difference. It’s the practical realization of a metaphor coined years ago by R Murray Schafer: the tuning of the world.

More information about Aparanthesi can be found at www.electrocd.com.


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Review

by Alison Melville in The WholeNote #9:4 (Canada), December 1, 2003 |672|

“… a fascinating and revelatory experience…”

I first discovered this label through Humeur de facteur, an electroacoustic recording created by Yves Beaupré from the various sounds made during construction of a harpsichord. It was a fascinating and revelatory experience, and Aparanthesi by John Oswald is no less so.

Oswald, born in 1953 to what he describes as “a profoundly amusical family”, is a familiar Canadian figure in the world of new music. He created Aparanthesi, of which two versions appear on this disc, as an exploration of a single pitch, an idea with which he has worked in several earlier compositions. “I was hoping to find an interesting way to follow… the morphing of a pitch through various instrumental, acoustic and electronic forms,” he tells the reader in a lengthy interview contained in the CD package. The results are quite remarkable. Using the sounds of piano, cello, birds, thunder and rain, cattle, a foghorn, and more, Oswald has created an extraordinary, interior/exterior auditory experience. There isn’t sufficient space here to go into further ‘technical’ details; follow the links at www.electrocd.com if you’re curious. What I personally appreciate is Oswald’s invitation to tune into a particular musical sound-world, and then to follow its effects upon one’s own inner world. Kudos to empreintes DIGITALes for providing us with the opportunity.


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Review

by François Couture in All-Music Guide (USA), October 21, 2003 |659|

Aparanthesi stands as one of his most enigmatic works, worth every bit of effort required from the listener…”

This album is not about “plunderphonics,” but you’ll find a lot of the sound morphing that has become characteristic of John Oswald’s work. And without the “who-did-he-mistreat-this-time” hook, Aparanthesi stands as Oswald’s most difficult, challenging album yet. It has a lot to offer though and every listen reveals new details -- and there are enough in here to last through many listens. The album presents two versions of Aparenthesis, a 30-minute piece built on a single note: A. A piano is at the center of the piece, but it is joined by sine waves, field recordings, strings, and a piano tuner. But everything that happens has been filtered in order to “retune” it to A or one of its harmonics. You can compare it to looking at the world through a lens that would make all light converge toward a tiny point. And yet the experience is much stranger than that, especially since Oswald operates slow morphs between the most unrelated sounds. The two Aparenthesis, studio and concert versions, differ significantly from each other -- enough to justify the release of both pieces. The dynamic range is extreme, some sound events happening on the threshold of audibility, and yet both pieces begin with an overwhelming chord (for the concert premiere the audience was asked to wait outside the concert hall while the chord was sounded inside, otherwise it would have been unsafe) that slowly descends toward nothingness. The liner notes consist of another conversation with the fake interviewer Norman Igma in which Oswald takes both tracks completely apart, explaining every little detail as if he was determined to dispel every iota of mystery in the work. Well he fails miserably: even after this difficult read, Aparanthesi stands as one of his most enigmatic works, worth every bit of effort required from the listener, and that despite is rather anti-climactic nature.


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Review

by Massimo Ricci in Touching Extremes (Italy), August 25, 2003 |625|

“A major milestone in acousmatics history…”

It’s useful thinking about the extreme contrasts in John Oswald’s output. Famous for his “Plunderphonics,” a multidimensional musical-genre kind of studio schizophrenia; concretely active as a sax improviser in various new music settings. Yet in Aparanthesi the Canadian composer stretches forms, lights and dynamics out of a single pitch, forcing ears to be constantly in full-receptivity mode and tuning any event to that ‘big note’: a piano chord, a thunderstorm, frequencies that bats would hear better than humans. This concept is fully described and discussed by the author in the CD booklet, which I encourage you to read carefully; what remains to be said is that this is music at the highest depth and introspection levels: its ‘one’ note is at the same time a signal, a promise, a mirror room, an expectation, a blood pulse, those small signs our body transmits at night when silence surrounding us becomes unbearable. Listening to this record is like watching the sun complete its cycle through the day: firm-looking, it actually moves and radiates incessantly and - before disappearing under the horizon - it reminds you another day has passed by and you’re still another little point in that universe you thought you were the centre of. A major milestone in acousmatics history, this work confirms there’s no need to talk too much to get to the point. Yes - you need SILENCE to listen to Aparanthesi.


John Oswald: Aparanthesi: reviews

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