The Edge of Chaos (review)

Lawrence Casserley (born 1941, Dunmow, England) has been an active composer and producer of electronic music since the late 1960s. Although raised and educated in the USA, he has long been part of the British electroacoustic music scene: for more than 25 years, he was on the staff of the Royal College of Music (RCM), London, for much of that time as Professor-In-Charge of the Electroacoustic and Recording Studios; since his early retirement in 1995, he has worked as a freelance musician, based in Buckingham.

Mr. Casserley is best known as a collaborative artist, working throughout the 1970s with his own multimedia ensemble, Hydra, and subsequently with many other collaborative groupings, including those most commonly associated with his name, Electroacoustic Cabaret and HyperYak. He also continues in a long-established association with the Colourspace project, founded by Peter Jones and Lynne Dickens, both as a major contributor of sonic environments for it, and also as director of musical events like the Nettlefold Festival, which is held annually within the walk-in sculpture. Mr. Casserley has also contributed substantially to other sound/sculpture installations, such as the recent large-scale Fabulous Sound Machines exhibition.

In recent years, the bulk of Mr. Casserley's performance and compositional activities have centered around the use of a Sound Processing Instrument (SPI) of his own design and implementation, based on an IR-CAM Sound Processing Workstation (ISPW) under the control of Max software. To date, Mr. Casserley's discography is made up of performances of material composed for others to play, or else recordings of collaborative improvisatory sessions, where his contribution is largely articulated through real-time modifications of the sounds produced by other performers.

The Sargasso CD under review here, The Edge of Chaos, represents something of an interesting departure, therefore, in that all of the works on it were composed and performed entirely by the composer alone. Its 58 minutes of music are the result of three weeks spent in the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in January 2001. The source material is invariably simple in nature, deriving from Mr. Casserley's playing of instruments from his collection of Chinese gongs and cymbals, metal sheet, and home-built monochords, or from samples of his own voice. The final sonic product, however, is invariably complex. The original sources are recorded through a large array of microphones and mixers and a computer multi-track recording system, and are subsequently processed using the SPI. The transformations are often radical and multilayered, rarely allowing the original source sounds to surface for long.

In the disc's liner notes, the composer writes that even this solo production is not entirely devoid of collaborative influence. He cites the fact that the (prose) writings of Jorge Luis Borges and the works of the Spanish expressionist painter Antoni Tàpies were uppermost in his mind throughout the production period. This is reflected in the way that many of the tracks draw their titles from these inspirational sources. (The composer is nevertheless at pains to point out that the titles were attached to each of the tracks only after the compositions were completed, and that no interpretation of the inspirational works themselves is to be inferred, merely a loose association.)

Inspiration notwithstanding, improvisation clearly remains of the essence in these works, both in the production of the originating source sounds and the transformations of them. The luxury of improvising within a studio environment and not entirely in real time, has, not surprisingly perhaps, permitted the production of more considered and refined compositions than those commonly produced within a purely live improvisatory environment. The result is an enormously engaging series of interrelated tracks of great depth and intensity, by turns introspective and exuberant (although rarely untroubled) in nature.

The disc opens with Ragnarök (Parable 1) (10:31), a prolonged, processed percussion improvisation. The work swells...