Beautiful, floating-above-Earth photos from a Nasa space mission adorn this sharp looking digi-pak from Nepless, an Italian label bent on reissuing some of the most lovely of the long lost electro-acoustic pieces. Edgardo Canton was a member of the GRM from 1959 to 1965, and an independent composer who worked there until 1973. This CD collects three of his principal works from the 1960s and another from 1984. “Animal Animal” (1962) is comprised of very quiet and empty deep space floatation produced on a rhomboidal piece of tin played with a violin bow. “Voix Inouies” (1965) increases the volume a bit with metallic tweaks and shimmers. “We believe in those words which are able to lead our thoughts simultaneously into different directions…from the prison where reason keeps them and where time elapses in a linear manner from left to right.”

In “Une Espéce de Serpent” (1969), “The songs of certain birds have some features which are similar to those of electro-acoustic sounds, so that we can consider them as musically interesting. This consideration made the composer want to use some of them, altogether, in a work. [He] was sure that because of their analogies on the musical level, they wouldn’t fail to make contact…and it was very curious to see what happened on other levels when the contact was made. The results are here.” The title track is a 43-minute excerpt of a longer work which was combined with numerous NASA space flight images and presented during the Festival de la Photo of Arles in 1984. This is a long, travelogue-like piece of Milky Way proportions. Warm, pleasant shimmers alternate and combine with friendly, almost poppy instrumental passages–as well as the more expected pensive mystery clouds–to form an emotionally uplifting work, which is rather unusual in the realm of electro-acoustic music, a form that is so often imbued with darker hues. “Next time I go up there again, I want to take this music with me!”—NASA astronaut