John Young

La Limite du Bruit collects five acousmatic works by the New Zealand composer John Young, made between 1995 and 2001 in Wellington, Paris, Stockholm and Leicester. Young works with his own environmental recordings and with the play between recognisable sources and studio transformation. Each piece here starts from a single family of sounds and stretches it until the source is almost, but not quite, lost.

Pythagoras’s Curtain, dedicated to Denis Smalley, takes its title from the curtain behind which Pythagoras’s pupils heard their master, the origin of Pierre Schaeffer’s term “acousmatic”: sounds of the hands are redesigned until cause and effect fade behind a second veil of abstraction. Three works form a sequence moving between sounds inside and outside the body. Inner magnifies a single breath into a world of vowel-like colours and won 1st prize at the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award in 1996. Virtual treats the wind, usually the enemy of field recording, as the hidden energy of an illusory soundscape, set in the notoriously windy city where he lived; it received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 1997. Time, Motion and Memory, dedicated to Paul Rudy, turns the sound of a childhood swing towards a giant pendulum.

Liquid Sky, commissioned by the Ina-GRM and premiered in its Multiphonies series in 2000, explores rain on different surfaces, from single droplets to saturated noise, with fireworks envelopes laid over heavy rain and resonators that draw out slowly changing inharmonic spectra. It won 2nd prize at CIMESP in São Paulo.

Born in Christchurch in 1962, Young studied with John Cousins at the University of Canterbury and with Smalley at the University of East Anglia. He directed the studios at Victoria University of Wellington before joining De Montfort University in Leicester in 2000, where he is now Professor of Composition.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0261, 2002.