12. Bernard ParmegianiDe Natura Sonorum
I was lucky enough to see Parmagiani perform before he died. At this point I’d heard a few pieces and wanted to know how it would translate to a concert. It seemed to me that lots of this was stuff that you kind of get, and then you have got it. It’s not something that you crave hearing repeatedly, you wouldn’t put it on when you get back from the pub. Would it be a chin scratchy job or would it come to life somehow?
The performance was something that I won’t forget. They had set up speakers all round the room, hung from the ceiling. Parmegiani was in the middle with a mixer and a computer running what looked like stems. ‘So it’s a spacebar job’ I thought, ‘he’s gonna fade in and out the stems, bash some FX on; bit of panning, whatever’. However, it was, despite my dismissive assessment, brilliant. The multi-speaker thing was not a gimmick, it really made the sounds live in different parts of the room, and the way that he manipulated the elements, moving them and blending them suddenly made the set up make complete sense. This wasn’t a playback of some music with a laudably academic origin, it was a strange abstract sonic illusion that was being tailored to work in this room. All thoughts of cutting tape and Musique concrète , were forgotten and we all just got swept away in what turned out to be sound magic, nothing less.
On top of blowing our collective minds he looked very like Santa Claus and oddly didn’t play last – the second support band played after him. Later in the evening I overheard someone from the production team say that he asked to play earlier because he didn’t want to play ‘too late’ and it made me think that he really could not have made that room any more his own that night.
