The wheel of the year keeps turning, and we find ourselves, once again, at the threshold of Beltane. As we await the rising of the Scorpio full moon, here is a musical offering to the season by Michael Eisenberg. Michael is an avid, deep listener of Acousmatic music, which he defines and explains in a previous article. He is an editor at Metapsychosis and writes for Avant Music News.
Spring comes with a ready-made image—rebirth, color, warmth, return. Acousmatic listening has other plans. In this second, spring installment of the Acousmatic seasonal playlist, I will suggest another ten albums, all available on Bandcamp. For a more complete rundown on Acousmatic music including a condensed history of the space and, more importantly, my ideas of how and why to listen to this type of music, please check out the winter playlist.
Acousmatic music offers a spring break. No, not those college rituals held in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, or Orlando. The spring break I’m referring to is a spring that breaks free of its tropes and clichés. We can always equate this season with new growth: nature wakening from its long winter slumber, green shoots punching out of the hard, cracked surfaces of a ground slowly thawing, a riot of colors blossoming on hill and dale. Big hats and that wonderful rite of passage that takes the guise of the above mentioned “party it up” scene, held in the warm climates of Florida and other destinations, round out the picture.
Like the transformation of winter’s barren landscape into a condition for growth, the acousmatic listening condition offers a similar clearing. Foreign sounds, veiled of their origin, loosen recognition and allow the ear to enter an open field of possibility. This sonic intrusion of the unrecognizable enters as an outside force which crosses thresholds and displaces boundaries. Those well-worn clichés of the season—rebirth, renewal, color, warmth—begin to lose their hold. Our traditionally held images of spring have now become a bit unstable.
With the emergence of this outside force, our long-held expectations, our dyed-in-the wool ruleset of what music should be, become malleable. Spring, after all, never fully resolves into the pastoral calm we assign to it. Rain overruns boundaries, wind enters through cracks, birdsong cuts across the familiar, and the outside presses insistently inward. Acousmatic listening does not offer us the comfort of seasonal return we’ve become accustomed to. These sonic forces that refuse their source see to that.
In this way, instead of mirroring our long-held notions of spring, Acousmatic music is breaking them. It strips away the comfort of known symbols and returns us to something less stable, less familiar. It’s a way of listening that precedes meaning. This Acousmatic Spring leaves itself open to encounters that allow for new meanings, and in this way, breaks in the old allow for the blossoming of the new.
I hope the following playlist succeeds in taking you into your own spring break. The selections are in no particular order.
Denis Dufour, Bocalises. Denis is an artist I hold extremely close to my heart. Not only is he of that second generation of GRM Acousmaticians following Pierre Schaeffer—the generation who has succeeded in molding, shaping, and advancing Acousmatic Music into the now and beyond—but his big box set (the first of two) launched me on my quest of looking for, finding, and attempting to cross the bridge to (Corbin’s) Mundus Imaginalis. (Didn’t quite make it, but my understanding of what this can mean has certainly become clearer.) This release has him composing with a single sound material: glass jars. This is Acousmatic Music in its purest sense. Listening to Bocalises is proof positive that sound, of any kind, deserves a place on the artists pallet. The beauty is in the details. Must I say (again)—headphones please!
Monique Jean, L’adieu au s.o.s. This is the first of several releases on the great empreintes DIGITALes label. It is an album of quiet urgency, although it doesn’t begin that way. Sweeping, wide angle vistas, massive enough to see entire weather systems born, disperse, and die give way to dark liquid interiors. These internal places are explored with sound as a beacon, leading and lighting the way, but only dimly. There is a dark beauty stretched across these planes, like a black satin thread. A lifeline to the day world left behind. Keep it close; you may need it.
Gilles Gobeil, La mécanique des ruptures. Monique Jean’s black thread terminates at a portal to the outside where an industrial tableau of gears, pulleys, springs, turbines, belts, and steam materializes. Here, in this world, natural organic life is sidelined. It’s there, somehow, subsisting in this place, in the margins, but look around; it’s all machine. Running hot during the day, cooler at night, this machine is self-replicating. An elevated viewpoint might expose its borders, but the borders are forever expanding. The viewpoint will be subsumed quickly. This machine breathes itself forward in all directions and upward until land is no more, life is no more, and atmosphere is swapped out for mech. Purpose forgotten, here, God is blacksmith.
Lauren Redhead, hearmleoþ—gieddunga. An album that can be listened to quietly and yet still sound busy and raucous—I find this condition happening a lot in the Acousmatic music space. Voids are persistently filled as the soundstage expands; the listening field has no room for silences. There is a spatiality here that presents itself consistently throughout this recording, an engulfment that lingers. Again, details are legion, and you don’t have to turn it up to hear them. Sounds zoom in, whoosh out. Voices form circles around your head. Familiar noises approach from a distance but exit from unfamiliar doors, stage left, stage right. A quiet immersion of sound, a paradox of listening situations that wears space itself as its garment.
Robert Normandeau, Tangram. The title invokes an ancient Chinese puzzle consisting of seven pieces: five triangles and two quadrilaterals. Together they form a square, but when separated the pieces can be rearranged into a myriad of possible formations. Like the Tangram, the music on this album shifts, morphs, and fractalizes throughout its entirety. Like Bergson’s durée, there is no underlying constant—only continuous change. Every so often, I come across a recording that initiates a sense of becoming, in which each moment transforms the whole. The sounds on Tangram are not separated into isolated units, rather each sound carries the previous sounds with it, unfolding like a flow rather than a series of discreet events. “Have a nice trip” is the usual send-off, but in the Tangram it’s redundant. The trip is always nice.
Roxanne Turcotte, Libellune. Similar to Monique Jean’s recording, this album explores a deeper nightside—one buried beneath the rubble of memory and habit. A small chaos brews, a quiet apocalypse, buried underground, spins and whirls, sending out circular ripples from below. Within this eternally dark space are memories wrought in movement. Most remain hidden—fleeting traces of activity that linger at the periphery. Some show themselves through motion, through dance. Turcotte taps into this nocturnal world, tracing systems of thought that may, or may not, surface. Much is held back, but what is shown, what surfaces, holds value beyond measure. Listen, you may be surprised.
Jake Muir, Campana Sonans. This is a collection of field recordings of bells from various chapels and churches around Western Europe. Most are electronically transformed, often layered, resulting in an exquisitely dense and thick morass of ringing metal. The clear-cut liturgical associations of these ringing tones are initially presented in the opening minute or two, but their meaning quickly begins to break apart. Familiar carillons, so iconic of Old Europe, become a massed sound edifice that points beyond any fixed coordinates. Familiar frames of consciousness crack, crumble, fall to dust. Imaginal constructs begin to take shape as stretched alien forms flash, flicker, cohere. A new medieval landscape shimmers into view as the outside world presses inward, reshaping the personal and the subjective. A place to wander, a place to marvel.
Ingrid Drese, Lointain intérieur. Nothing but epics here. Remember those Yes albums with the Roger Dean gatefold covers? Well, Topographic Oceans just got mapped. Relayer got real. Close to the Edge becomes the fall it only hinted at when your sixteen-year-old self first opened that cover. Dean would have a field day with this. Time holds in suspension and the Word is BE! (And it is). The sounds on this recording are Progressive—with a capital “P”—but there are no Mellotrons. No capes. Moogs? Unlikely. Rickenbackers, Gibsons? No. Only the orphan, cause-less cries of a world between you and the angelic. Ingrid Drese: bridge maker par excellence.
Horacio Vaggione, ‘Schall’ / ‘Rechant’. Along with Curtis Roads, Vaggione’s specialty is micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound. Listening to a Vaggione album is like encountering an exploded view of a sound object. This kind of reduction is all about texture and flow. In the hands of an alchemist of his caliber, sonic grains, some no longer than 1 to 10 milliseconds, are combined and shaped into a musical whole that is nothing short of stunning. These are worlds you can get lost in. Worlds composed of fields of sound, alive with motion, drift, and turbulence. Sometimes, like sand slipping though fingers. Sometimes, like mist forming and dissolving. Sounds without edges—only residue. Listening to Vaggione is listening to the liminal. Whatever lies between presence and disappearance, that is what is being tapped.
Lucrecia Dalt, Rabbit Trap (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). Taken as a stand-alone listening experience, this release holds it ground. I tend to resist being guided by an artist’s stated intentions, preferring instead to construct a personal cinema for the ear—even when it diverges completely. Rabbit Trap allows for that freedom. It opens itself to drift, to association, to whatever direction thought happens to take. There is a persistent mood here—something suspended between melancholy and dread. A sense of searching runs through it, as if a solitary figure were moving through the interior of their own uncertainty. Each listen returns me to a place of haunted sadness. It may take on a different shape each time, but something remains constant: a subtle but unmistakable sense that something is not quite right. What emerges is the feeling of being alone, searching for a source that never quite comes into focus but always feels just within reach.
Spring breaks, and something else begins to be heard.
Enjoy
Michael
Michael Eisenberg is an editor at the Metapsychosis Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art. As part of his curatorial work for the Acousmatic Crossings series at Metapsychosis, Michael hosts Live Diffusion calls, scheduled Zoom sessions featuring artists who have or will be writing essays for the series. Michael’s passion project is to overlay esotericism, both ancient and modern, on top of Acousmatic music to discover connections, correspondences, sympathies, and synchronicities which aid the listener in receiving an integrative, imaginal experience. Across his writing, Michael demonstrates how Acousmatic music removes the visual source of sound purposefully; encourages deep, imaginative listening; allows sound to become symbolic rather than representational; gives the composer granular control over sonic “geometries”; and creates a liminal space where listeners can encounter non‑ordinary states.
Thank you, Michael. I will use this list as a ritual to welcome Spring. So appreciated.