Andrew Lewis

Au-Delà spans twenty-five years of acousmatic work by Andrew Lewis, from Time and Fire, begun in 1987 at the University of Birmingham, to Lexicon and a revision of Dark Glass in 2013 at Bangor University in Wales, where he directs the Electroacoustic Music Studios. Three pieces were conceived in eight channels and appear here in stereo.

Lexicon, originally a work for sound and video, starts from a poem in which a 12-year-old boy, Tom Barbor-Might, describes his experience of dyslexia. Lewis worked with the Miles Dyslexia Centre at Bangor, with support from the Wellcome Trust, and built the piece primarily from speech sounds, following research that places the core difficulty in phonological processing. Dark Glass uses panes broken at a glass works in Llandygai: each fragment rings with a pitch that was latent in the whole, larger pieces low, smaller ones high.

Ascent, commissioned by BEAST in 1994, took on the mountains seen from the Bangor studio and received a prize at Bourges in 1997 and a Euphonie d’or in 2004. Time and Fire keeps a fast turnover of momentary ideas over a subtle underlying pulse and won second prize ex æquo at Bourges in 1991. Cân, Welsh for song, works with harps, male-voice choirs, pibgorn and preaching to get beyond the postcard image of Wales. Scherzo is made from the voices of his three daughters and their musical toys, and received honours at Ars Electronica and the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award.

Born in Sutton in Ashfield in 1963, Andrew Lewis studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, completing a doctorate in 1991, and was one of the original members of BEAST. He is Professor of Music at Bangor University and directs Electroacoustic Wales.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 13125, 2013.