Natasha Barrett

Isostasie gathers the music Natasha Barrett made between 1998 and 2001, after she moved from England to Norway. Five concert works sit between three short extracts from Displaced:Replaced, a sound and image installation made with photographer Trym Ivar Bergsmo for the Ilios festival in Harstad. There, sensors for temperature, humidity, light, rain and wind steered the playback of 90 minutes of prepared sound over an ambisonic cube, so the weather itself decided the structure.

Weather and landscape run through the other pieces too. Three Fictions (Northern Mix), first made at the IMEB in Bourges, uses a statistical simulation of rain falling on a surface and the path of the midnight sun to place its sounds. Red Snow (Microclimate II) grew from her first winter in Norway and takes its title from snow tinted red by algae. For Viva la Selva! she travelled to a Central American rain forest to record animals over 24 hours with a microphone array: howler monkeys, poison arrow frogs, manakin birds, cicadas, with some calls replaced by human voices. The piece won a prize at Ciber@RT in Valencia.

The Utility of Space, an exploration of spatial structure prefaced by a verse from the Tao Te Ching, was composed in ambisonics for the Ultima festival in Oslo and remixed in stereo for this disc; it took a 1st prize at Bourges in 2001. Industrial Revelations listens to a valley being reshaped by machines near her home and won 1st prize at Musica Nova in Prague the same year.

Born in Norwich in 1972, Barrett studied with Jonty Harrison in Birmingham and Denis Smalley in London for her masters and doctorate, and has been based in Norway since 1999. Her awards include the Nordic Council Music Prize and the Giga-Hertz-Preis.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0262, 2002.