Patrice Sciortino

Featuring: Le Quatuor De Percussion De Paris

Sciortino studied with Tony Aubin and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, and you can hear both influences refracted through a sensibility that refuses easy categorization. Messiaen's taste for color and resonance survives, but stripped of the Catholic mysticism, redirected toward something more phenomenological. The music asks: what does it mean for sound to occupy space? How do frequencies claim territory?

There's kinship here with Gérard Grisey and the spectralist school, that obsessive attention to the inner life of tones. But Sciortino works on a more intimate scale, chamber-music dimensions rather than orchestral sprawl. The Arc En Ciel pressing is predictably rare; the music deserves a proper reissue campaign. Until then, hunters of the French avant-garde have another quarry to pursue.