Jonty Harrison

Évidence Matérielle brings together five acousmatic works that Jonty Harrison composed between 1982 and 1999, most of them in the studios of the University of Birmingham. In his note he pictures his work as a wide street with Pierre Schaeffer’s abstract sound objects on one side and soundscape, where sounds matter “because” of where they come from, on the other, and himself weaving between the two. The pieces on this disc move back and forth across that road.

Klang starts from two earthenware casseroles found in Denis Smalley’s kitchen, tapped and rolled close to the microphones; it was realized at Magyar Rádió in Budapest, commissioned by MAFILM, and received a 1992 Euphonie d’or at Bourges. It had appeared before on UEA (1984) and NMC (1996). Sorties was written for Web, a walk-through installation by seven BEAST composers and graphic artist Lorne Christie in a canal-side warehouse, and keeps returning to the image of leaving an interior only to find oneself trapped inside another.

Surface Tension, commissioned by the IMEB in Bourges, uses styrofoam, polyethylene and bubble-wrap from the packaging of a supposedly environmentally-friendly refrigerator. Splintering, commissioned by the French State and the Ina-GRM and dedicated to his parents, records wood split, chopped and trodden underfoot, then splinters it again through granulation and across the stereo space. Streams, written for the Sonorities Festival in Belfast in 1999, draws on river, shore and rainfall and was Harrison’s first piece for tape alone in multichannel format.

Born in Scunthorpe in 1952, Harrison studied at the University of York and worked with Harrison Birtwistle at the National Theatre before joining the University of Birmingham in 1980, where he directed the studios and BEAST. He is now Emeritus Professor there.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0052, 2000.