Peter Stollery

Scènes collects six works by Pete Stollery composed between 2004 and 2007, most of them built on field recordings and on his interest in sounds that carry memory or are about to vanish.

Three pieces belong to Gordon Soundscape, a project mapping the sounds of the former Gordon District in Aberdeenshire, and premiered together in an auction ring at the Thainstone Centre in Inverurie in 2005. Still Voices preserves the sounds of the Glendronach Distillery before it gave up coal: kiln doors, raking, rolling barrels, grain mills and the burn that runs through the grounds. Resound sets interviews with local people describing sounds that no longer exist, a threshing machine for instance, within a montage of field recordings. Fields of Silence uses fields before the harvest and the stubble left after it, some of which gives a pitched sound when plucked.

Back to Square One, commissioned by the IMEB in Bourges, takes the rise and fall of radio commentaries from 2007 sporting events and a Parisian bar crowd during the 2006 World Cup. Serendipities and Synchronicities was written for Standing Wave, a play about Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, using old analogue feedback loops and the crackle of one of her records. scènes, rendez-vous, dedicated to his father and realized at the Ina-GRM, retraces on foot the route of Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film C’était un rendez-vous, with rules taken from the film: one walk, one hour of recording, no idea what would turn up.

Born in Halifax in 1960, Stollery studied with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST. He is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Aberdeen and co-founded invisiblEARts in 1996.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 11111, 2011.