Diptych by Kari Väkevä (review)

[Editor’s note: Selected reviews are posted on the Web at http://www.computermusicjournal.org (click on the Reviews tab). In some cases, they are either unpublished in the Journal itself or published in an abbreviated form in the Journal.]

Diptych is an album featuring electro-acoustic, computer-generated music by the self-taught Finnish composer Kari Väkevä. Väkevä works primarily with fixed media using synthesis software written in C++, as well as programs written by the composer himself. Before solely focusing on his compositions, Väkevä worked for many years in the information technology industry, which included work designing and building robots. The sense of the alien and automation carry through into the music on this recording.

According to the liner notes, Diptych is a single work divided into two parts entitled Moondog and Sundog. Moondog is further divided into five movements, and Sundog contains three. Diptych, 80 minutes long, was originally conceived as an octophonic soundtrack for an installation, in which the music was looped nonstop. Each section or movement can also be performed separately. According to Väkevä, the piece is too long for standard concert presentations, so the purpose of this recording is to present the entire piece in a single format. Diptych was composed between 2012 and 2015 but not released on the present recording until 2017. Between 2015 and 2016 it was performed in various configurations at festivals.

Diptych was conceived in three phases: synthesis of the foreground material, use of filtering and processing, and mixing. The large-scale formal plan for the composition involves a transposed series of slowed-down tremoli that revolve around the circle of fifths, within an accelerating tempo scheme. The transpositions involve fifths in just intonation—so, interestingly, after circling around, the composer arrives at a different pitch from where he started. In general, Diptych engages with pure texture and a few harmonic accoutrements, without imparting any sense of melody or rhythm.

The first movement of Moondog opens with deep, bell-like sounds with resonant trails. The composer does little to hide the clearly artificial, computer-generated nature of the sounds. One also immediately notices the work’s attention to space and spatialization, and the fact that the composer does not shy away from various forms of distortion or sonic overload. Some of the early works of Brian Eno come to mind as a comparison, but Väkevä’s use of dynamic changes, spatialization, and distortion places it in a more nuanced context. At about 4:30 a barely noticeable layer begins to be heard in the background. This initiates a structural procedure—utilizing dynamic layers to articulate material strata—that the composer uses throughout this piece. Each stratum also seems to evolve at a different rate of speed. At 17:22, this first movement is also the longest of the eight.

Conversely, at about 2:30 in length, track 2 is one of the shorter movements on Diptych. Along with track 4, these two vignettes were conceived as soft interludes, or palate cleansers, to separate the longer movements. Väkevä creates a composite sound environment with many separate parts, via various filtering and resonance techniques as well as inharmonic artifacts from frequency modulation. In this respect, tracks 2 and 4 are not unlike the other tracks on this album—incorporating sounds and processing techniques and a sense of timelessness—although here we encounter these attributes in miniature form.

Track 3 brings us back to the longer-length format. We hear deep, resonant, low-frequency drones offset with a slowly descending, loud cicada sound. There is also the sound of what might be described as giant rubber bands being plucked at various degrees of tautness. Here one is reminded of the once popular use of the Karplus-Strong algorithm. Track 3’s materials evolve at a leisurely rate through what we could call an amorphous approach to time. Väkevä deftly combines comb filtering with various types of amplitude modulation and a consistent use of inharmonic partials. Compositionally...