Elsa Justel

L’Ombre du Pont spans more than twenty-five years of work by Elsa Justel, from a 1995-96 miniature made in Paris to pieces realized in her studio in Mar del Plata between 2011 and 2021. Several are in eight channels, heard here in stereo. A thread runs through the album: six of the eleven pieces are tributes to other composers, each made with sounds borrowed from the dedicatee’s own music.

Casi nada uses sounds of Luc Ferrari supplied by the Association Presque rien and received a mention at the 2011 Prix biennal Presque rien. P-corde alludes to the strings of Bernard Parmegiani’s Violostries, a work Justel says shaped her calling as a composer. L’expérience caustique plays on the title of François Bayle’s L’expérience acoustique, C’est lui borrows images from Francis Dhomont’s Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, Wessen is a birthday gift made of fragments by Beatriz Ferreyra, and L’espace re-figuré 2 reworks material from Annette Vande Gorne’s Figures d’espace.

The other pieces go elsewhere. Déjà vu was written in COVID isolation, playing with objects and the old rebound effect. Ce monde et ailleurs, commissioned by the French State and dedicated to Roger Cochini, who recorded the voices, moves from humanity’s first babblings to a crowded, numbing media soundscape. Diálogo con Ana trades improvisations with the pianist Ana Foutel, and Pieza en forma de té, made at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio in Ohain in 1999, was her first eight-channel composition.

Born in Mar del Plata in 1944, Elsa Justel studied electroacoustic music in Buenos Aires with José Maranzano and Francisco Kröpfl, moved to France in 1988 and took a doctorate at Paris VIII under Horacio Vaggione. Her music has won prizes at Bourges, Ars Electronica and the Prix Ton-Bruynèl, and she also works in videomusic.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24193, 2024.