Brunhild Ferrari / Eiko Ishibashi / Jim O’Rourke – L’Oreille Voleuse

Brunhild Ferrari has collaged »acoustic memories« from her tape archive into the 20-minute mix L’Oreille Voleuse. The 89-year-old is one of the greatest living pioneers of electroacoustic music. The wife of the late composer Luc Ferrari was connected to the music research institute »Groupe de recherches musicales«, founded in Paris by Pierre Schaeffer in the late 1950s. L’Oreille Voleuse is a gigantic sonic maelstrom in which rhythms, drones, melodic fragments, human voices and natural sounds appear and disappear again as if by chance – like a hidden-object picture for musical and non-musical references and relations.

The original version is set against the reworking by Japanese musician and composer Eiko Ishibashi and American multitalent Jim O’Rourke. The long-standing duo’s version functions like a remix. Ishibashi and O’Rourke leave out parts of the source material, emphasise others, place them in different contexts and add their own sound fragments. And so a new composition emerges, one that functions at once as a memory of the original and as its extension.