Interrupteur/Tautologos 3

by Thom JurekThis first issue on former Gastr Del Sol guitarist's own label -- after the demise of Dexter's Cigar which was also a partnership with Jim O'Rourke --- is a reissue in the same tradition as Dexter's. Composer Luc Ferrari's two works "Interrupteur (For 10 Instruments)" and "Tautologos 3 (For 11 Instruments)" were first recorded by EMI in 1970 and have never before been issued in the United States. The significance of these two works from Ferrari's wildly diverse catalogue is that they are both departures from his animated and active music of the '50s and '60s. "Interrupteur" is an orchestral stasis point that begins to move. In the stillness created by the strings, time becomes one long block that creates the opportunity for various timbres and textures to rub against it, creating muted colors and shades. The events that occur inside the written score are chance actions (flurries of woodwinds or brass, a shriek from an errant viola, etc.) and cannot help but to move against that which is already unmoving and therefore deconstruct it gradually and methodically but without the purpose of transforming stasis into anything else but another form. "Tautologos 3" is a score that is cyclic in nature and uses a limited scale of notational devices. Utilizing standard orchestral instrumentation and the electric guitar, and magnetic tape, it is a work that is as hypnotic as it is maddening. The musical "cycles" or themes are short in measure and are played over and again in a patter than moves forward and backward but remains in some way familiar to the listener. During the editing and mixing process, Ferrari manipulated and spliced tape to create other cycles to overlay over the original compositions to that some span of time (as in minutes) would become familiar against a backdrop of something less movement oriented but nonetheless changing as it interacts with the previous cycles (as in weeks). The result is a piecemeal score that drifts and drones its way into the listener's consciousness and changes right at the point where familiarity is established. Both works took Ferrari's fans by surprise, but they followed him anyway, because, true to form, his restlessness took him to further points of abstraction before the end of 1971.