Souvenirs Cachés / Innermost — Vinyl

Persistence of Sound presents a split LP from two leading voices in electroacoustic music.

Beatriz Ferreyra and Natasha Barrett are known internationally for their intense explorations of the movement of sounds through space.

A member of the original Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), Ferreyra moved from her native Argentina to study with Nadia Boulanger and Edgardo Cantón in Paris in the 1960s.

Ferreyra contributed to Pierre Schaeffer’s book ‘Traité des Objets Musicaux’ (1966), collaborated on the realisation of Schaeffer’s ‘Solfège de l’Objet Sonore’ (1967), and went on to take composition lessons with Earl Brown and György Ligeti at Darmstadt.

As an independent composer, Ferreyra has received major international commissions, also composing for film and ballet. In 2014 she was elected as an Honorary Member of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music.

Following Ferreyra’s 2019 album ‘Huellas Entreveradas’ this album presents her new work ‘Souvenirs cachés’ (2020), alongside the 2003 work ‘Murmureln’, Ferreyra’s response to a commission to compose a danceable electroacoustic piece.

Whilst studying with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, Natasha Barrett was able to work with BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre), which led to a doctoral composition degree supervised by composer Denis Smalley.

Barrett has since established an international reputation as a composer of 3D audio and ambisonics. She treats spatialisation as a musical parameter, and told the New York Times,

“I’m really concerned with the idea of tangibility. Sound is invisible, but we can do things that make you want to reach out and touch it.”

Barrett describes her inspiration as coming from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves.

Barrett's works are performed and commissioned throughout the world, and have received a long list of prizes, including the Giga-Hertz Award and the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Awards.

‘Innermost’ (2019) uses material from two outdoor public events in Norway, where Barrett has lived since 2019. The piece exploits the latest processing techniques for image and sound recognition, already in use for mass population surveillance and tracking.