Randall Smith

Sondes (Multiple Soundings) covers four years of work by the Toronto composer Randall Smith, from 1995 to 1999. Known until then for musique concrète collages made of thousands of found sounds, Smith here sets three pieces for tape alone beside three mixed works where an acoustic instrument meets the loudspeakers. The whole disc was remastered by Ernest Cholakis at Numerical Sound with his own non-realtime processes, and the sleeve notes are by the filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.

Elastic Rebound takes its title from a term coined after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and uses hundreds of mostly non-musical sounds to suggest a landscape in tectonic upheaval; it won both the jury prize and the public prize at the Noroit-Léonce Petitot competition in Arras. In Continental Rift, commissioned by the Canadian Electronic Ensemble and played here by cellist Paul Widner, motifs borrowed from Bach, Beethoven and Kodály are pulled into an acousmatic assault (2nd prize at the Luigi Russolo competition, 1995). InsideOut is built from just five notes played by alto flute, violin, E-flat clarinet and double bass, processed so that a trace of each original remains.

Liquid Fragments 1, written for the Continuum ensemble, opens a series in which recordings of the live parts, here double bass (J Tracy Mortimore) and alto flute (Jennifer Waring), are processed into the tape part. Convergence, commissioned by Joseph Petric, places his concert accordion against recordings of non-Western instruments in three movements, and The Unmoved Centre was written for Réseaux in Montréal.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1960, Smith started out composing for experimental films in Toronto and made his first solo tape piece in 1987. Violin lessons with Eugene Kash from 1992 led him to mixed music, and in 1998 he began studying the Iranian tar.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9948, 1999.