Beatriz Ferreyra - Souvenirs cachés / Innermost (2021)

Mindboggling new material from GRM pioneer Beatriz Ferreyra and British acousmatic expert Natasha Barrett. Seriously next level outer zones for dedicated, adventurous listeners.

Ferreyra has been pushing sound into new directions since she joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1963 and here offers up new twelve minute piece 'Souvenirs cachés' and bundles it with 2003's shorter 'Murmureln' to fill out the A side. On the flip, tireless British sound alchemist Natasha Barrett explores Norwegian culture with 'Innermost', a long, ghostly abstraction of whispers, shouts and drones.

Both sides are essential listening for anyone with even a cursory interest in offworld abstraction or concrete music. Ferreyra's side sounds like the gurgle of a room full of woodwind instruments, pushed into a swamp of digital FX and seismic tectonic shifts. It's psychedelic by its very nature, toying with our learned perception of sound and tripping up our brain's programmed responses; voices become synthetic gurgles and electronic womps and transported into airy hisses and almost imperceptible clanks and croaks.

Barrett meanwhile uses two long recordings from outdoor events in her home base of Norway. Over the course of the piece, echoing almost inaudible voices and cheers suggest the blurry quality of memory before being squashed into numbing drones, pulling the mind into dark recesses pocked with occasional beams of light. It's phenomenal stuff, and both sides compliment each other perfectly.