David Berezan

Allusions Sonores brings together five acousmatic works that David Berezan composed between 2008 and 2011, all conceived for 5.1 or eight channels. Most start from field recordings made in a specific place, from southern Alberta to Bali and Japan, and move from recognisable glimpses of the real world towards more abstract, densely built sound worlds.

Buoy, made during residencies at VICC in Visby and EMS in Stockholm, takes its language from sea buoys, their bells, gongs and whistles set off by the motion of the sea, with droning pitches that allude to their transmitted signals; it won the prize at Música Viva in Portugal in 2012. Thumbs deliberately limits itself to a single plucked note from a Balinese thumb piano, transformed in pitch and grain and spread through space. Badlands, commissioned by the IMEB in Bourges, uses sounds collected in 2007 in the Badlands of southern Alberta, a region Berezan thinks of as home, with a nostalgia that gives way to stranger textures. Galungan draws on recordings made in and around Ubud during the Galungan religious festival, moving between the rice paddies and the ceremonies, day and night. Nijō starts from the nightingale floors of Japanese temples and palaces, such as Nijō Castle in Kyoto, built to chirp under the feet of intruders, and imagines what lives beneath the boards: birds, but also voices of traditional and contemporary Japan, recorded during a residency at Tamagawa University in Tokyo.

Born in Edmonton in 1967, Berezan studied history and composition in Calgary and Edmonton, then completed a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the University of Birmingham in 2003. He is Professor of Electroacoustic Music Composition at The University of Manchester, where he directs the electroacoustic studios and MANTIS (Manchester Theatre in Sound).

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 13122, 2013.