Label: Sub Rosa

Sub Rosaらしいマニアックな電子音楽!!1938年モロッコの都市であるサレ出身、自国で音楽を学んだ後、62年にパリに移り西洋音楽の前衛手法を学んだ作曲家Ahmed Essyadによる初の電子音楽集成が登場。モロッコのアマジグ民族音楽も取り入れたとされる奇怪な構造の作風が多く、中でも女性の語りや声を加工しまくった[Sultane](1973)が非常に強力。原形が分からない程に切り刻まれたボイス断片のシーケンスの奇妙さは圧巻です。









Composer Ahmed Essyad was born in Salé, Morocco, in 1938. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatoire (Morocco) he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a student of Max Deutsch and, later, his assistant. Trained in the avant-garde practices of Western musical composition, he also claimed the Amazigh folk music of Morocco as a fundamental source of inspiration for his work.

In 1965, he was already incorporating elements of oral tradition in his work so as to question the language of his time, and therefore had to cope with the limits of musical notation and communication with musicians who did not share his cultural references. It was difficult
to agree on what was implicit, 'behind the notes,' especially regarding the management of musical time and micro-intervals. In search of new compositional tools, he turned to electro-acoustic music. Working in a studio made it possible for him to be the interpreter of his own work, which ensured a certain continuity with music of oral tradition. The pieces presented here were produced between 1972 and 1974 in a studio dedicated to electro-acoustic music, the S.M.E.C.A, which was part of the Music Workshop founded by Jorge Arriagada in Paris. The studio was equipped with EMS and Minimoog synthesizers, a piano, a marimba, a xylophone, as well as various percussion instruments and a tape delay system.

The practice of electro-acoustics may have been a mere parenthesis in Ahmed Essyad's long and prolific career as a composer of contemporary music, but the works presented here are nonetheless important. They show how strongly he both supported North African popular forms of expression and opposed its folklorizing through simplistic and 'exotic' representations. It's not about fusing together East and West - impossible, he says: "the real point is to open up an imaginary space where another modernity can exist outside the largely Eurocentric framework of avant-garde music. Synthesis means anticipation, knowledge. As for me, I'm increasingly ignorant. I write to discover what I don't know. Music feeds me, it pollinates me. It's my daily wine."