Albert Mayr: Proposte Sonore

In 1966, Albert Mayr was a young pupil of composer Pietro Grossi, who had opened his own electronic studio, S 2F M, in order to escape the wars of aesthetics between the music faculties of European universities. Grossi was then working on cataloguing sine wave combinations and was strongly encouraging his pupils (and anyone else, for that matter) to rework his material and turn it into new pieces — an "open form" concept that would remain snubbed and ignored until the Age of the Internet. Between 1966 and 1969, Mayr composed a number of "sound propositions" using Grossi's material, and the 2005 Ants release Proposte Sonore reveals six of those pieces, growing from little more than successions of various sine wave beats — still surprisingly pretty in their bareness, as exemplified by "Proposta Sonora I" and "Proposta Sonora IV" — to increasingly complex works, culminating in "Proposta Sonora XIII," a slow-paced but fascinating ten-minute piece in which Mayr frees himself from Grossi's influence and turns his austere sine waves into a rich tapestry of ambiguous croaks and disquieting moods. Often using the left and right stereo channels separately to construct a dialog between sounds, the piece could be seen as a forerunner of the more abstract faction of the clicks + cuts movement of the early 2000s. The album also includes "An Old Lady's Wallpaper," a piece from 1969 featuring Grossi's source material in a slightly lighter context, and the 1983 composition for nine brass instruments "Abendgrün." The switching from electronics to acoustics can seem like an odd coda for the CD, but the sustained tones of this later work actually sound more closely related to the first "Proposta Sonora" than "Proposta Sonora XIII" does. ~ François Couture, Rovi