CD – Unsounds

Unsounds is a Dutch experimental label founded in 2001 by the guitarist and composer Andy Moor, the sound-artist Yannis Kyriakides and the designer and photographer Isabelle Vigier. The label recently released an interesting project by Maze, a free-form electroacoustic ensemble formed by some celebrated improvisational musicians such as Anne La Berge, Dario Calderone, Gareth Davies, Reinier van Houdt, Wiek Hijmans and Yannis Kyriakides. The combo focuses on the idea of introducing alternative musical approaches and listening perspectives, removing any sense of stylistic certainty and allowing the audience to explore their own artistic routes. Relating ideas about settings and dispositions, Alvin Lucier has suggested that artists “go to an outside environment (urban, rural, hostile, benign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any time later, recreate, solely by means of your voices and instruments, and with the aid of your memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations”. Lucier created the composition Memory Space in 1970, (Hartford) but the concept still works today and is appropriate for an urban environment like the city of Amsterdam: furthermore, the result of this “psycho-geographical” work depends on the musician’s “interpretational” skills, on their memory space and on their flexibility to effectively unravel those orientations.