Steven Naylor

Lieux Imaginaires collects six works for fixed medium that Steven Naylor composed between 2000 and 2006, mostly in the Electroacoustic Music Studios of the University of Birmingham and in his own studio in Nova Scotia. A sense of place connects them: a blurred memory of somewhere he has been, an immersive picture of somewhere he never wants to be, or a place that exists only in the imagination. Soundscape, radiophonic narrative and abstract sound often merge in the same piece.

The three earliest works belong to a series titled Imaginary Places, on the imperfect memory of travel. Irrashaimase and Bitter Orchids both start from recordings made in 1990 on an analog Walkman: the first an interior monologue on the robotic and delicate sounds of urban Japan, the second a hallucinatory return to the Chiang Mai night market, where music lessons kept being interrupted by small motorcycles that became part of the piece. I wish is built from fragments of Home, a song of lament Naylor had written years before, sung by Rita Rankin.

Automatopoiea: Study 1, for eight channels, explores the mechanical toys of the Devon designer-maker Tony Mann, and kune kune the voices of a pair of New Zealand Kunekune pigs recorded near Bath. The longest piece, The Thermal Properties of Concrete (27 minutes, eight channels), is set in a world of people without an address: Jody Stevens plays its fictitious narrator, alongside two anonymous planners from the City of Halifax. Naylor names Glenn Gould’s polyphonic radio pieces, starting with The Idea of North, as a source of inspiration. The work was selected for Phonurgia Nova in Arles and the ISCM World New Music Days in Sydney, and the album was nominated at the East Coast Music Awards 2013.

Born in Woodstock, Ontario, in 1949, Steven Naylor composes electroacoustic and instrumental music, performs on piano, electronics and seljefløyte, and writes for theatre, film and radio. He completed a PhD in composition at Birmingham under Jonty Harrison and lives in Halifax.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 12120, 2012.