fury |cs111

A mais recente das novas propostas da Creative Sources Recordings para 2008, é Fury (CS111), obra de Robert van Heumen, artista sonoro holandês (n. 1965), além de matemático, trompetista e programador de software. Van Heuman, dirige o STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music), trabalha com laptop, controladores e live sampling (LiSa). Fury (After Anger), a primeira de duas, é uma composição electrónica em quatro andamentos, encomendada em 2006 pelo festival Sonic Circuits, de Washington DC. Originalmente pensada e estruturada para 5.1 surround, a versão aqui apresentada foi transposta para dois canais estéreo. A segunda parte de Fury, inclui a peça “semi-improvisada” They Would Get Angry Sometimes, derivada da primeira e executada ao vivo, em 2007, na Brown University, Providence, EUA. Fury inspira-se em depoimentos sonoros e em textos escritos na América do início dos anos 40, que relatam episódios trágicos ocorridos nos anos que se seguiram à Grande Depressão e à queda da bolsa de 1929-31, em que hordas de agricultores famintos fugiam das suas terras com as famílias e se dirigiram ao Sul, em busca de melhores condições de vida no Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas e no Missouri, até terminarem em campos da Farm Security Administration, na Califórnia (1940-1941). Em ambas as composições a estratégia do compositor é basicamente a mesma, e passa pelo tratamento algoritmos e de sons pré-gravados, em paralelo com sons captados e processados em tempo real, utilizando a ferramenta electrónica SuperCollider. O método de Robert van Heumen é simples: tocar, ouvir, reagir, combinar, sobrepor, recombinar e transformar, como a outro respeito e com outra formulação ensinou Lavoisier. O resultado, com um pé na rádioarte, é surpreendente. Eduardo Chagas (Jazz e Arredores)

'Fury' is the first real CD by Robert van Heumen, a name that may not ring an immediate bell (perhaps, who knows), but who is an active driving force in the Dutch improvised electronic music. He's active with such bands/collectives/projects as OfficeR, Skif++, RKS, Shackle and founding member of N Collective, if not organizing events for Steim in Amsterdam. His primary instrument is the laptop running software like LiSa (live sampling) and SuperCollider, sampling everyday sounds and making them sound like anything but everyday sounds. On his debut CD he has two pieces. The four part work 'Fury (After Anger)' and 'They Would Get Angry Sometimes'. The first uses texts about 'Dust Bowl migrants living in Farm Security Administration camps in central California (1940-1941). Many Americans fled the Great Plains looking for work and a better economical and ecological environment". The texts however do not play a big part in the composition. There is a bit of guitar like sound to be spotted (self-played? taken from the original recordings), and a bit of text, but throughout the title piece is a racket of noise tumbling through the bits and bytes of the computer - but beware it's not noise in the traditional sense of the word. It's dynamic, ever changing, crackling, loud and soft, buzzing and hissing. Even without being able to understand the text, which doesn't seem to be absolutely necessary, this is a very nice piece, shifting back and forth between abstract sound and more melodic passages. The second piece uses some similar sounds but is altogether a strict abstract piece of music of an even harsher quality type of noise. Vibrant music this is, great music - moving away from the delicate structures of microsound into the land of noise based textures. More Mego than micro. Great start! Frans de Waard (Vital)

"Fury (after Anger)" is a new project by Robert von Heumen made up of two recordings: the title track, split in four different tracks, and "They Would Get Angry Sometimes". The former has been commissioned by the Sonic Circuit Festival in Washington and the latter has been composed from a performance at Rhode Island's Brown University. Both the works show their "in progress" structure and a strong conceptual approach, in part because of the sound forms riskiness, really suggestive, impalpable, ultimate, but somehow subject to the textual dynamics: recordings dating back to 1940-41 concerning the immigrants' life in the California's Farm Security Administration camps. Van Heumen's thesis is that "Fury" is functional to a specific investigation on the human beings primitive dynamics, our inner part that we feel very hard to eradicate or control. The author perfectly succeeded in emanating a sense of disquietude, even avoiding to decipher all the included texts. The texts are then suspended among drones, hums and buzz'n'crackles: muffled rustlings and dissonant glitches, wonderfully acted in a vibrant music crescendo but also still ambiguous, harsh and unstable. Aurelio Cianciotta (Neural)

(...) "Fury" (CS 111) Roberta van Heumena to wedlug autora elektroakustyczna wedrówka po mrocznych stronach ludzkiej psyche. Teksty zaczerpniete ze wspomnien mieszkanców obozów FSA przeznaczonych dla migrantów, ofiar katastrofalnej erozji gleby, która miala miejsce w srodkowo-zachodnich rejonach USA w latach 30. i 40. ubieglego wieku, nie wydaja sie byc az tak wazne, jak sugerowalby odautorski komentarz zamieszczony w ksiazeczce towarzyszacej plycie. Przykryte warstwami elektronicznego pylu unoszonego podmuchami noise'owej zawieruchy i czesciowo poddawane de- oraz rekonstrukcji jakos uciekaja sluchaczowi, pozostawiajac go sam na sam z wyrafinowana szpetota muzyki. Wiemy, ze slowa, zdjecia i muzyka wyrazac maja gniew, zlosc, wscieklosc i ich konsekwencje i tak chyba sie staje, ale dzieje sie to przede wszystkim za sprawa samego dzwieku. Dwie twarze kompozycji Holendra - plyta zawiera jej dwie, wykorzystujace te same dzwieki wersje: czteroczesciowa studyjna oraz koncertowa, improwizowana - rózni struktura i forma, rozlozenie akcentów i zestawienie ze poszczególnych elementów. Sprawia to wrazenie, ze kompozycja nie jest dzielem zamknietym, ze jej immanentna cecha jest nieustanna zmiana, ciagla ewolucja, ze utwory, które znalazly sie na plycie to tylko jedne z wielu mozliwych wersji. Byc moze te nie sa calkowicie doskonale, lecz zawsze pozostaje nadzieja, ze gdzies czekaja na nas te wlasciwe. (...) Tadeusz Kosiek (Diapazon)

In Robert Van Heumen's music there seems to be no more than a partial correspondence connecting the original notion and the ultimate outcome. In fact, although he talks about "the primitive in men" in his rationalization of this recording, the forces pushing humans to fury are neither portrayed in detail nor really felt by the listener.
Maybe a concept of "growing tension" could be appropriate to exemplify the sonic content of this CD, which is not an easy task at all. Let's just say that the two long segments giving shape to the disc were realized with the same fundamental sources, including a woman speaking of clashes between colonists and Indians, a few notes of acoustic guitar, utterly deformed orchestral timbres and what's akin to a cross of extreme synthesis and shortwave emanations. The materials are worked and moulded with erudite imagination by the composer, who succeeds in creating a soundscape that's not even remotely associable to anything this writer heard of late. There's a sense of impenetrability at work, like a cautious intention of disguising the essential core of the composition by recurring to a mixture of vibrations, rumbling frequencies and extraneous elements, only rarely made gentler by female apparitions - a cyclical whispering voice, for example, and the above mentioned lady recalling the old times - but in general tending to that glacial disposition that renders the man from the street unwilling to perk up the ears throughout a complex
electroacoustic project. In this particular circumstance, it would be their loss as "Fury" is an intriguing effort, whose effect on the psyche - especially when listened with a headphone capable of absorbing the impressive dynamic socks of the piece - is evident, exactly as the will of repeating the experience time and again to better comprehend the peculiar fascination of this unusual arrangement of events that doesn't want to know of being memorized, instead offering further indications with each new listen. Massimo Ricci(Touching Extremes)

Dutch electronic improviser, member of an electro-acoustic project (OfficeR) and of a trio active in audio-visual arts (SKIF++), mathematician, trumpet player, software programmer and so on…
Robert van Heumen’s compositions are created using primarily the laptop and, specifically, running the software LiSa for a live sampling and SuperCollider for a real-time audio-synthesis.
This is his first CD, containing two titles: “Fury (after anger)”, a composition in four movements built on distorted, crackled, buzzed sounds with episodic fragments of spoken words, repetitive at times but often consisting of entire pieces of text taken from historical documents about “Dust Bowl migrants living in Farm Security Administration camps in central California (1940-1941)” (see here). Subtle melodies generated by a guitar occasionally interfere.
“They Would Get Angry Sometimes”, the second piece, has nearly the same structure, but with more incidence of computer treatments and, perhaps, of noise.
Original work of sampling and programming, great combination of different sound sources, thus an excellent debut. (Spiritual Archives)

With some of the last releases I can say Creative Sources has become some sort of electronic label. This cd won't deny what I've just wrote, infact despite its oddness "Fury" can be undoubtedly filed in the genre, it's a 5.1 work commissioned by Washington Sonic Circuit festival, is that enough?. The four tracks composing "Fury" even while changing a bit have been linked thanks to some vocal samples, the first and the third moves around some simple guitar arpeggios, the second and the fourth tracks instead are a bit more abstract and dealing with electronic sounds, ghostly atmospheres and soft noisy solutions. Talking about composition we're not speaking about one of those randomly chaotic works where things come in and out with no specifical reason, here you can sense there's a basic idea. "They would get angry sometimes" follows the same footsteps and in someway reminds the atmosphere of the four movements in which the first composition is divided. Andrea Ferraris (Chain DLK)