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Peter Batchelor - Kaleidoscope
Not every modern electro-acoustic/electronic composition jumps out
at you like a jack-in-the-box. Some works say what they want to say in
slowly unwinding narratives, so you have to open up and concentrate
over time to get what the composer intended.
That's how Peter Batchelor's series of works collectively known as
Kaleidoscope (Pogus 21073-2) plays out--slowly. There are five segments
in all, four in the "Kaleidoscope: Cycle" and one in "Kaleidoscope:
Arcade". They were composed for eight-channel playback and the set
comes with a DVD that allows for that (or for that matter 5:1). The CD
gives you a two-channel version.
The various sections were composed between 2004 and 2013. It is a music
of silence and sound, the sound being mainly unpitched event fragments
with some recognizable but electronically transformed pitched elements
entering into the segments at seemingly critical junctures.
It is music for the long-haul, long-formed unfoldings of abstract
sound, some of it rather quiet, all of it less performative than
discursive, a thoughtful conversation of sound between aurally
transformed sound materials.
The multi-speaker DVD version brings out the discursive give-and-take
of the music more dramatically, but the two-channel CD version brings
it together in ways that remain comprehensible.
I won't say that this is my favorite electronic work this year. It is a
work that I need to hear more. There is a particular complexity that
does not readily avail itself to you without study, close listening in
an undistracted environment.
Give Kaleidoscope that attention and you will begin to feel its
importance. That is saying something. Whether this is "great" or only
extraordinarily interesting (which is enough) I have not decided. Time
is necessary! Give a listen and decide for yourself. - Grego Applegate Edwards
Peter Batchelor’s Kaleidoscope is an acousmatic work meant to model
in sound the kinds of dynamic patterns visible through a kaleidoscope.
The five pieces that make up the work were composed for a listening
environment situated in the middle of eight speakers arranged in a
circle; listening to the recording can only approximate the spatial
effects obtainable in such a setting, and to that extent is something
like listening to a reduction for piano of an orchestral work. Still,
there’s much to like when these pieces are listened to just for the way
they organize sound.
For the first four tracks, Batchelor arranges digital samples to trace
the trajectory of things breaking apart, the pieces diverging and
converging again. Drawing on a variety of sound sources, including
field recordings of natural and artificial phenomena, and using
looping, repetition, and granular manipulation, Batchelor juxtaposes
similar and contrasting sound colors of varying intensities, density
and dynamics to achieve his aim. Though the identity of the sound
sources is for the most part obscured by manipulation—this is
acousmatic music, after all—sometimes, as in Fuse’s recognizable
samples of rainfall, they reveal themselves. The final piece, an aural
portrait of a gaming arcade, evokes its subject through chirps, beeps
and buzzes that will elicit memories in anyone who’s ever played a game
of Space Invaders in a public space.
Kaleidoscope comes as a two-disc set. A DVD-ROM contains the work in
its full, original eight channel format, while a stereo CD is included
as well. - Dan Barbiero, Avant Music News
[translated from
Italian[ Peter Batchelor is a composer of electroacoustic Birmingham
with specialization in the field of spatialization and sound
installations. E 'among those composers who delved into one of the most
fascinating problems of electro-acoustic theories, namely that the
construction of sound devices such as " trompe l'oreille , "meaning
that" trick "the ear, making us believe that they live the sound source
at inside.
The Pogus Records, a label of the current most active in the field of
electronics and electro-view perspective of abstract experimentation
and interactions, has recently published a compendium of the work of
Batchelor where English formalizes a record in his ten-year study on
the subject. The CD collects cycles tried to live " Kaleidoscope ": the
reference is to those little gizmos that tubulars have been so
successful in the past, having an outlet end view, useful to see a game
of beads dynamic set in motion by rotation of the tube. As explained in
the notes Batchelor, this dynamic generation of symmetric images can
also be applied to the world of sounds, when you think about the rapid
changes the sound itself may suffer as a result of a particular
configuration of space or movement of musicians and listeners in space
required by the exhibition. The song remains the same, but the
perception of it changes by virtue of our physical location.
For his installations Batchelor uses pre-recorded that accompany a
speaker system 8 or 12 channels deployed in the hall according to a
strict order of allocation. The purpose of "Kaleidoscope" is to create
a sound environment in which to "live" in person these dynamics of the
sound, and it is certainly the latter that we must start to make
commensurable the sonic journey. In the five compositions present
Batchelor shows already have that ability compenetrativa that is often
lacking in the world electroacoustic, a march in the activity proved to
be more closely related to the sound materials to be assembled: the
sound reproduction stimulates masterfully around the optical axis of
the tube, provided it is equivalent sound, even through break or at
least were waiting; dynamism "sonic" of the beads is something that has
to do with our rotary motion, and amplifying proactive context you can
provide images musically strong, also a victim of the complexity of
matching dynamic, but they are able to express feelings dazzling.
Batchelor's skill lies in knowing how to separate the movements so as
to provide those phases with different texture that you "found" in the
sound world that we experience.
As already stated several times in these pages, the phenomenon of
spatiality is not negotiable in a technological path to fruition
physical (such as support Peter recommends buying the DVD and not the
CD) as a path that ultimately makes it available as a result of the
different perception of the listener: the multiple sensations that come
out from listening to the music in a room pre-configured can not be
transferred on CD and I do not see how this could happen; on this point
the event technology, already concerned about the lack of sales of the
CD, I think it is only able to "collapse" the space environment in a
stereo version, in which, however, appreciate a unique generic point of
view of listening to this type. If I were in different places of the
room, my perception of the sounds would be different. Thanks to some
new computer is not even in the type of use, I'm thinking. example of
what has been done to build the cds that can be read dynamically, in
which the music files can be listened to only through a PC that plays
them in a different way and random. However, it is certainly more
difficult to transfer the concepts of variability of the recording
depending on our perceptions. But, beyond technical considerations, the
cycles of "Kaleidoscope" turn out to be excellent electro-acoustic
works, both when they simulate the fracture of the beads or their
shifts, and when the will is to live other reality as the reality
equivalent sound multifaceted that it is listening from gaming machines
(flippers or other similar) as in the cycle of "Arcade".
This condition is still critical to understand, however, that it is
always the quality of the idea and the basics of sound to be important
to be able to cause that effect in our system aural illusion. - Hector
Garcia, Percosi Musicali
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