Evgueni Galperine

CD version. Theory of Becoming is the ECM New Series debut of Evgueni Galperine, a composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage who has lived in Paris since 1990. Its ten pieces are not performances in the usual sense. Galperine builds them from recordings of real and virtual instruments, transformed on the computer into what he calls an "augmented reality of acoustic instruments". The music sits somewhere between electroacoustic composition, contemporary chamber writing and a film score without a film.

Galperine studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire and electroacoustic music at the Conservatoire de Boulogne, and works as a film composer, which shows in the narrative cut of each track. Here he is credited with electronics and sampling. The material was recorded at Studio EGP in Paris between 2020 and 2021. It was mixed in November 2021 at Les Studios de la Seine by Galperine, engineer Aymeric Letoquart and Manfred Eicher, who produced the album. Three guests leave recognisable traces: trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov on three pieces, cellist Sébastien Hurtaud on the opener and Maria Vasyukova's voice on Don't Tell.

Each piece follows a story or an image. This Town Will Burn Before Dawn imagines a walk through a destroyed city, with Hurtaud's cello set among bells, sirens and footsteps. Galperine has said the idea "took on a whole new meaning with the invasion of Ukraine". Oumuamua, Space Wanderings follows the interstellar object observed in 2017 with a synthesizer fanfare and an insistent pulse. Loplop im Wald borrows its name from the bird figure that haunts Max Ernst's painted forests, a tense, nocturnal close to the album.

The press response was wide and unusually warm for a debut. On NPR, Tom Huizenga wrote: "If you could hire a composer to score your dreams, Evgueni Galperine just might be your man." In Big Takeover, Michael Toland heard "the widescreen arrival of a composer of significance". Télérama counted it among the most impressive artistic gestures of 2022, and the Morning Star gave it five stars.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2744, released on 21 October 2022, with a 16-page booklet that includes Galperine's own notes in French and English.