David Prior - Descent (2023)

Descent is a selection of works spanning over 20 years. While it reflects Prior's background in the acousmatic tradition that emerged in the UK from musique concrète, Descent departs from several of the core Schaefferian precepts that underpinned the musique concrète to which it owes so much. The idea of sound as a quasi-sculptural material is a central tenet of musique concrete, with the goal of plasticity brought ever closer through generations of sound processing technologies. As with the chiaroscuro of Renaissance painters, the apogee of acousmatic compositional achievement appears to have been the ability of composers to transform their source materials, bending them towards their musical agenda. But for Prior, sound is something encountered from a position of reverence and a recognition that the meanings of sounds derive from the sources that create them. In place of the ‘reduced listening’ Schaeffer espoused as a means by which to draw out latent characteristics of a sound by disassociating it from its source, the sounds in the pieces that form Descent delight in what they are and gain their meaning only in what they are and their relation to one another.

David Prior is a musician by background although throughout his career, his work has spanned music, photography, film, writing and installation.

He is also an academic, originally teaching at Dartington College now at Falmouth University, and for over a decade, he has collaborated with architect Frances Crow in Liminal, a studio that has in one way or another explored the relationship between sound, space and listening. In 2010 they won the PRS Foundation New Music Award for their piece The Organ of Corti.

He has also consistently collaborated with other artists and musicians, often as a composer, sound engineer or producer.