Various Artists

Miniatures Concrètes is the second disc of electroacoustic clips from empreintes DIGITALes, issued slightly more than seven years after the first Électro clips: 24 new works of exactly three minutes each by as many composers from across the Western world. It was the 37th release of the label and appeared in 1998, the year of the 50th anniversary of musique concrète, which the producer Jean-François Denis describes as the label’s way of celebrating its development.

The notes show that the composers worked under common rules. Several start from three given sounds, and Kim Hedås questions the required form of one part of 15 seconds and one of 2 minutes 45, inventing her own reasons for it in a piece shaped like a bat flying over the stars. Katharine Norman uses only the three sounds to make a grungy, slightly Irish-sounding dance in Squeaky Reel, while Randall Smith granulates them in SuperCollider for Collision. Paul Steenhuisen circles the painter Julian Schnabel in a theme and variations, Andrew Yencken builds a kinetic sculpture inspired by early Hermeto Pascoal records, and Sylvia Eckermann and Mathias Fuchs make a horror clip out of bees, hornets and dentists’ drills.

Some clips condense or open longer projects. Natasha Barrett’s Racing Through, Racing Unseen is a sonic postcard from the south side of Blackfriar’s Bridge drawn from her 20-minute Racing Unseen, and Roger Doyle’s The First Spirit Level opens Spirit Levels I-IV, part of The Babel Project and winner of the Programme Music prize at Bourges in 1997. Other contributors include Åke Parmerud, Jocelyn Robert, Ned Bouhalassa, Elizabeth Hoffman, Monique Jean, Richard Karpen, Lelio Camilleri, Elsa Justel, Stephan Dunkelman, Jos Smolders and Justice Olsson, who ended up managing 1500 samples on a spreadsheet for his three minutes.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9837, 1998.