Arturo Parra

Parr(A)cousmatique was born in 1997, when the Colombian guitarist Arturo Parra commissioned four acousmatic composers, Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau and Stéphane Roy, to write stand-alone tape works. Parra then composed his own guitar part over each, turning it into a mixed piece. Both versions of the four works premiered on May 15, 1998 at the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville. This disc presents the definitive mixed versions, completed in 2000, plus a fifth piece made the same way with the Colombian composer Mauricio Bejarano.

The guitar was recorded in real time, without accessories or preparation, on a 1984 instrument by the Madrid maker Manuel Contreras, with the player’s own vocal sounds. The short texts in the booklet, written by Parra with Catherine Ego, give each piece its image. In La basilique fantôme, built on Roy’s Récit pour cordes, the guitar takes on the timbre of breath to enter an abandoned church. Sol y sombra… L’espace des spectres uses Dhomont’s En cuerdas, itself drawn from Parra’s improvisations, and sets guitar and tape against each other as matador and bull. In Soledad, on Gobeil’s Derrière la porte la plus éloignée…, each guitar sound is isolated so that none can sing together; it won a public prize at CIMESP in São Paulo. L’envers du temps comes from Normandeau’s Ellipse, and D’or et de lumière evokes a man of gold diving into an emerald lake.

Born in Bogotá in 1958, Parra co-founded Cuarteto Espiral, the first Colombian guitar quartet, and moved to Canada in 1989, becoming the first Latin American to receive a doctorate in music from the Université de Montréal. He has invented over fifty extended guitar techniques and since 2010 has directed the guitar department at Juan N Corpas University in Bogotá.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0264, 2002.