Canto

Vinyl LP pressing. Recorded in 1974, Canto del loco is a 13-minute passage into Ferreyra's wildly creative mind. She honed her craft as a sound artist at Paris's highly-regarded GRM, studying musique concrète and electronic music. These skills are demonstrated here as she explores the characteristic sound of monophonic oscillators which she overlays, echoes and distorts, pushing her techniques to the limit. Without compositions like this, it would be hard to imagine the fertile creative landscape that inspired artists like Keith Fullerton Whitman or Jim O'Rourke's to venture on modular and tape music excursions. 2009's Pas de 3... ou plus dials back the synth in favor of pure concrète alchemy, with taped hisses, gurgles and wordless syllables pushing on the dimensional membrane, echoing the vanguard work of Ferreyra's GRM contemporaries Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani. 'Jingle Bayle's' makes a direct nod to this era, paying tribute to electroacoustic titan François Bayle with both it's cheeky title and pots 'n pans acousmatic weirdness. 1971's 'Etude aux sons flegmatiques' is another lengthy high-point, as Ferrarya commands nausea-inducing feedback drones, juxtaposing disharmonic tones and fabricating a glassy, psychedelic microcosm. It's important material, not just because Ferrarya began creating at a time when this kind of experimentation was rare, but because she approaches heady, academic themes with a level of mischievousness and creative glee that lends her work serious longevity. "Canto+" is out there, but brilliantly approachable.