Cem Guney is a Turkish-born sound artist who came into the microsound genre via a background in DJing and trumpet playing. I’d like to think Guney performed those activities simultaneously, but those sorts of one-man-band strategies tend not to go down especially well in the more serious corners of the electroacoustic universe - and Portugese label Cronica must surely be branded as such: some of the very finest musicians within contemporary digital acousmatics gravitate towards the label, but Guney doesn’t disappoint. These compositions draw on both synthetic and recorded sound as source material (as tends to be the case with this genre) but Guney focuses more on the processes and side effects of these methods of composition, fabricating pieces of music out of pieces of echo or fragments of crackle on ‘Factitious Phobia’ and ‘Impulse’. Elsewhere Guney is content to step into the domain of an influential contemporary, ‘Undulations (dedicated to Janek Scaefer)’ using samples and looped ambient structures in a fashion not dissimilar from certain works by the artist referenced in the title. While Praxis could hardly be accused of gping out of its way to expand the vocabulary of modern electroacoustics, you’d certainly have a job levelling any other complaint at this engrossing body of work.
05.2008 Boomkat