Peter Stollery

Un Son Peut en Cacher un Autre (one sound may hide another) collects seven stereo acousmatic works that Pete Stollery composed between 1993 and 2003, most of them in the studios of the University of Birmingham and of Northern College in Aberdeen. Stollery works with sound as a sculptor or potter works with material, placing every object precisely in space, and all these pieces play on the ambiguity of listening: a real-world sound is recognised, then heard as pure shape and texture, then lost.

Each work is introduced in the booklet by a fellow composer. Jonty Harrison writes on Onset / Offset (1996), which opens with a key turning in a lock. Alistair MacDonald follows Peel (1997), a BEAST commission in which a spinning roulette wheel is stretched and peeled back. Simon Atkinson describes Shioum (1994), built from a simple feedback loop, and Joseph Anderson hears Debussy’s Images and Ken Russell’s Altered States behind Altered Images (1995), made from bicycle spokes, which took second prize at CIMESP ’97 in São Paulo. Adrian Moore presents Shortstuff (1993), a special prize winner at Musica Nova 1994, and Andrew Lewis the BBC commission ABZ/A (1998), a short trip through Aberdeen. Robert Dow writes on Vox Magna (2003), recollections of the vast machines of a British industrial era, recognised at Musica Nova 2003.

Born in Halifax, England, in 1960, Stollery studied composition with Harrison at the University of Birmingham, where he was one of the first members of BEAST in the early 1980s. He is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Aberdeen, and in 1996 co-founded invisiblEARts to perform acousmatic music across Scotland.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0678, 2006.