AMN Reviews: Beatriz Ferreyra – UFO Forest + (2023; Room40) Part Two

In Part One I tried to describe the high weirdness of the Eighth Climate in terms of how the ancient Persians experience time and space through the lens of the Islamic mysticism scholar and philosopher Henry Corbin. I also floated my ideas on how the beliefs in a realm accessible only by the cognitive imagination (mundus imaginalis or Eighth Climate) can be connected to the art of Acousmatic music from a listeners standpoint. Using the new album by Beatriz Ferreyra (released on the Room40 label) called UFO Forest+ as a model… I’ll provide impressions on its four works while specifically keeping an ear out for those “special” moments that succeed in disrupting my own space-time continuum.

It’s hard to believe that the first track, UFO Forest is almost 40 years old. Composed in 1986, this piece has aged impeccably! Some of the sounds used would not be out of place with the more well-known Berlin School synth artists like T-Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Ash Ra Tempel. The main difference I hear is the mechanistic arpeggiated sequences that are so prevalent with those artists are manifested in UFO Forest in a much more free-form way. They don’t provide that driving, forward motion… instead they are scattered around the piece adding texture and mood at just the right moments. This lack of “forward motion” should act as a first clue that “time” and “space” is being challenged.

The piece vibes more air and sky than earth and ground. The sound events used are much more synthetic and, spatialization-wise… I get a sense of vast, wide empty spaces. An infinite openness as the sounds are whirled around the listeners skull cap presents itself in slow, wide concentric arcs. Space is the entirety of all, and all is space.

At random points, pieces of these sound orbits break off from their mother trajectories under their own phantom power into intense pinwheels of white energy before breaking apart and fading away. It’s at these moments where Ferreyra folds space. These random breaks in the slow sound orbits provide an acute, contrasting modification to the listeners sense of space that allows one to activate their cognitive imagination and visualize just how big these spheres are. For me, that allows for an idea of the magnitude of the whole tableau. Think having a space eye view of a massive futuristic, planet-sized metropolis, only to zoom out and realize that this particular metropolis is only a tiny microcosm of an object of galactic dimensions.

Supporting the structure is an ever shifting drone of voices (?) that seem to morph along with the more “up-front” events only in a much more subtle fashion. This bedrock of sound can easily be “not noticed” but once sensed, this aspect of the piece as a stand alone object is fascinating in and of itself. It too succeeds, in it’s endless siren-like sound to evoke a feeling of “big places”.

On Vuelo de signos y remolinos, a short piece composed in 2010, the aspect of time as a product of state changes is clearly demonstrated front and center by the wonderful flute playing of Hernan Gomez along with the equally amazing sound transformations achieved by Ferreyra. Within its three minutes, the work is packed with events that undergo mutations of their original characteristics resulting in radical changes of their nature.

Instead of introducing a sound event in its already changed state, where the listener has to, or feels the need to guess what the origin of the sound is without given any clues as to where it came from or how it was produced, Ferreyra lets us know immediately what the source is (in this case… the flute). The state changes after that initial realization as she proceeds to mangle our expectations by intentionally molding the source into something else that doesn’t square with the original sound.

At this point, it would seem perfectly natural for the listener to do their own mental A-B comparison analysis on what they are experiencing. What was heard before, the safe harbor of a known sound source… in the blink of an eye becomes something rather cold, alien and unrecognizable. This sudden distortion works in turning the piece inside-out… messing with our linear storyline expectations and throwing our sense of time into disarray.

My favorite piece on the album is Cercles des rondes. According to Ferreyra’s website, the piece composed in 1982 was originally over 18 minutes. Here, it’s edited down to 11 minutes. It’s also a bit of an odd duck when compared to the other works in this collection.

Cercles des rondes begins in a style that I’ve never heard from Ferreyra. In 1982 some might call this “music to play on Halloween to scare all the trick and treaters”. The avant-chamber stylings of early Univers Zero and Art Zoyd immediately come to mind. Fast forwarding to “the now”, you wouldn’t be far off the mark if you heard the opening minutes of this piece crawling towards a “dark ambient” vibe.

“Dark ambient” with a few twists though. Indulge me while I add a little more (of the already excessive amount) of creative interpretation here. The piece opens with a long series of bass pulses created from indeterminate sources. They aren’t layed out in any set rhythm, instead dropping at random points in time. They build in volume and quiver in nervous anxiety until finally disintegrating into nothing or morphing into a “not understood” robotic human voice. You’re mind wants to guess when the next one will rear it’s scary visage and smack you upside the head but it will always be wrong… because of this randomness. Something else too… sometimes there is a ghost presence of a melody appearing. It never fully resolves into something you can actually hum but, it seems like it’s just on the precipice of a melodic structure. They vaguely remind me of those bass pedal tones in the beginning of Pink Floyds Time, maybe you’ve heard of it?

But Ferreyra knows better. She’s introducing elements of temporal ambiguity within this world. These sound events exist in a state of perpetual present, lacking clear beginnings or endings. This can convey the idea that, within the imaginal realm, time is not strictly defined by sequential order. These low-end pulses randomly exist, and that’s all they do… exist. No rhythm, no melody (even tho you want to hear one)… no nothing, they just exist, and because of the existence… the disturbing drama of the piece sky rockets!

Somehow she is able to connect this aural disturbance with a more typical acousmatic sequence that follows. If the piece was already unsettling… what follows penetrates a new veil into a nightmarish state of a decaying future gasping for any hint of saving grace the universe wants to dish out. It gets nothing.

Vivencias def from 2001 completes the trip. By now, by my reckoning this far into the album… I was gifted a sense of co-existing within the music… a shared “something” within a very dramatic soundscape. After Cercles des rondes, I didn’t think it was possible to jack up the drama level… Vivencias def does just that. Whatever Ligotti-like nihilism was thrown down previous to the last piece… it’s explored in great detail now. (And I use the term “now” very loosely because “the now” is rapidly eating itself.)

Spatially, the hit to my consciousness was straight down the middle and right between the eyes. There is incidental movement left and right but, for the most part Ferreyra isn’t pulling any punches at this point. For the first time within the albums entire duration there seems to be a terminus approaching. It’s in the form of an immovable and impenetrable black wall where time AND space, if they were there to begin with… just ends… stops completely… kaput.

Vivencias def can be looked at as a reminder, something to provide contrast with what came before… that in the end, the concepts of time and space can be as illusionary as the artist wants. The skillful deployment of these illusions are a talent that rests in the hands of many great Acousmatic creators. Beatriz Ferreyra’s small sampling of works on UFO Forest+ exploits these abilities to the nth degree. In my book, she is truly one of the great masters at showing truth as illusion, or perhaps illusion as truth. Don’t sleep on this excellent release!

Part One

Mike Eisenberg (meisenberg1@hotmail.com)