Dual Attractor
Claire Edwardes
★★
I am quite possibly the wrong person to review this CD, despite being a great fan of Claire Edwardes as a musician. While I was undergoing rigorous daily piano lessons and learning to master some of the greats of the instrument, in 1954 my father brought home an LP of musique concrète. This was largely a French-based movement, attempting to differentiate between music based on the abstract medium of notation and that created using everyday sounds and electronics.
Of course, for lovers of notation-based music and ‘a good tune’, this was anathema. Claire Edwardes, founder of that brilliant group Ensemble Offspring and probably Australia’s leading percussionist, has produced a CD under her own label consisting of seven works, all of which are sure to be enjoyed by lovers of musique acousmatique, as I believe it’s now called.
The six composers featured are all mistresses of the genre and include Missy Mazzoli, Gemma Peacocke and Anna Meredith, whose ‘Bumps per Minute’ first gained fame as an installation piece for dodgem cars, set in the famous courtyard of London’s Somerset House. It’s bound to be a hit on ‘Ultima Thule’, heard on this station on a Thursday night. Not so sure about the rest of us. But then, as I say, I’m probably not be best person to judge.
Michael Morton-Evans