Reviews

Thanks to a collaboration between Circuits - the Europe-wide tour programme organised by Miso Music Portugal - and the Association of Irish Composers, two exciting and contrasted multimedia events from the Belfast Sonorities festival got a second exposure in Dublin, writes Andrew Johnstone

Miguel Azguime's hour-long melange of video and processed vocals, Salt Itinerary (2004/2006), places a veneer of piquant unpredictability on a fastidiously planned and persuasively paced scheme of varied sensory events.

Many of the visuals, and almost all of the sounds, are generated during the performance, and delivered via a pair of adjacent screens and a ring of loudspeakers. The live electronics are handled with well-nigh balletic grace.

In the midst of all this, and magisterially immersed in it, is Azguime himself. Gawking into the camera, scrawling on a tablet, morphed into a cartoon, or clad in reflective white before a screen, he is the thing projected and the thing projected upon.

Vocally too, with his solo utterances multiplied and refracted by digital processes, Azguime is in a constant state of self-reflexiveness. And these technological wits are matched by literary wits, for his libretto - which takes Portuguese, English, French and German through semantic gamuts of sense and nonsense - has quasi-Joycean appeal. In this multimedia opera, then, both technology and language function as playthings of equal and endless fascination.

Acoustics again met electronics, though without the same sense of compelling integration in Azguime's Paraitre Parmi (2006), performed later in the evening by the redoubtable Smith String Quartet.

This work threw together some diffuse musical ideas in a series of blocky paragraphs, sometimes adding a halo of gentle digital distortion or a light garnish of bubble-pops that seemed little more than afterthoughts.

Michael Alcorn, the concert's only non-Portuguese composer, took his computer to centre stage for Leave No Trace (2006). Without a written or printed score, this music was generated on the spot and appeared ephemerally on each player's own laptop display. Still, there was no disguising the composer's personal idiom.

The Smith Quartet conveyed a powerful sense of the strange-yet-inevitable with Emmanuel Nunes's purely acoustic Chessed III (1990-91), and luxuriated in the scintillating digital aura of João Pedro Oliveria's Labirinto (2002).

Most thought-provoking, however, was Pedro Rebelo's Shadow Quartet (2007), whose pre-recorded elements gave voice to four specially adapted violins suspended over the performer's heads. The notated ideas may have been thin, but these self-sounding instruments suggested the eerie and menacing presence of Hoffmannesque automata.