Randall Smith

L’Oreille Voit collects five fixed-medium works that Randall Smith realized in his Toronto studio between 1988 and 1994, the period when he wrote only electroacoustic music. The title (“the ear sees”) points to what the booklet writer Gary Popovich hears in it: sounds that call up images, from a door closing to rockets and birdsong. Smith dedicates the disc to his brother Chuck, who introduced him to electroacoustic music, and to Bernard Parmegiani.

The Black Museum (1993), in nine movements, was commissioned by ACREQ for its Clair de terre series and premiered at the Planétarium de Montréal. Smith conceived it as a museum of what he learned from other composers, dedicated to the history of the GRM, and it borrows a door sound from Robert Normandeau’s Rumeurs (Place de Ransbeck). It won 1st prize at the Luigi Russolo competition and the GMEM prize in 1993. La volière (1994) builds an aviary of machine-made birdsong around the human voice.

Ruptures (1991) was written in response to the instability that followed the end of the Cold War. CounterBlast (1990) takes its title from the book by Marshall McLuhan, setting concrete and synthesized sounds against each other with an extreme dynamic range that echoes McLuhan’s bold fonts. In The Face of the Waters (1988) no real water is heard: the brooks and waves come from electronic sounds, broken springs in a chesterfield, glass objects and lightbulbs.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1960, Smith started out writing for experimental films made in Toronto and composed his first solo tape piece, Fleeting Wheels of Changes, in 1987.

CD in crystal case, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9416, 1994.