Mario Verandi – orillas distantes / distant shores
discogs / EMF CD 035 (2001)
Electroacoustic music works spanning from 1995 until 2000

“Mario Verandi’s music goes beyond music. It’s electronic. It’s also theater, dance, sound art, film, radio. In fact, Verandi has such a strong sense of dramatic personality, and his music is so evocative, that you’ll find yourself in a musical theater. You’ll hear percussion instruments from Brazil. You’ll hear the sounds of Barcelona, with its street bustle, guitars, and rhythms, in your living room. He evokes a kind of flamenco that you’ll rarely hear, with suggestions of guitars, the dancing and tapping of many shoes, the chanting and singing … and uses it to set his musical stage for Lorca’s ‘Blood Wedding’. And there’s a playful side to his music as he plays with the sounds of paper and cloth, glass, leaves, plastic bottles. All the world’s his stage.” EMF Media (Electronic Music Foundation), New York, 2001.

Review by Laurie Radford for the Computer Music Journal, Winter 2005 Vol.29 MIT Press Journal:
orillas distantes / distant shores is a compilation of six electroacoustic works by Argentinean-born composer Mario Verandi. His studies in Barcelona and his activities as a member of BEAST (Birmingham Electro-Acoustic Sound Theater) at the University of Birmingham are evident in the finely sculpted sound practice throughout these works. The pieces presented on orillas distantes / distant shores adhere to two distinct categories in Mr. Verandi’s work: the use of recognizable sound sources and soundscapes in combination with transformations and extensions of these same materials, and a more extensive, abstract style of composition that distances the sound sources from their associative origins.
Evil Fruit (2000) explores the world of a selection of Brazilian percussion instruments: deep resonant skin and wood timbres tapped out in rapid volleys and rolls; crystalline, metal shards pulsing and bouncing across the stereophonic field. Throughout the piece, the composer pries open the drum’s iterative pace and reveals moments of reflective, bell-like resonance. The alternation of abrupt and subtle metallic punctuations ushers forward a series of contrasting iterative textures until a human voice appears to modify and meld with the drum. The evident percussive origins of many materials give way toward the end of the piece to a broader, less distinct sonic image that transports the listener into a distant sonic space. Finally, a climactic increase in spatial proximity and sound-object density returns us to the drum and voice of the work’s origins. Fréquences de Barcelone (1997), awarded a prize at the International Radiophonic Competition in France, takes the sounds of Barcelona and thrusts them onto the sound stage amid a variety of other carefully chosen sound materials. The work is both soundscape and fantasy, a recontextualization of daily urban sounds, conversations, street music, rushing waves, and the shrill cries of children at play filtered, stretched, fragmented into a dynamic and fascinating race through the sound world of this vibrant city. Mr. Verandi judiciously juxtaposes moments of traffic chaos with the calm of late-night rain, the din of a midday restaurant with modified bells and the blur of faraway traffic. This piece is a shapely and colorful voyage that hints at an underlying urban narrative of discovery and the magic of a living sound. Employing spoken texts from Bodas de Sangre [Blood Wedding] by Federico García Lorca and samples of Spanish flamenco music, Figuras Flamencas (1995) straddles the real and the surreal, from the familiar twang of the flamenco guitar and the earthy tones of flamenco singing, to ghostly textures of ringing, spiraling string sounds punctuated by frenzied vocal incantations. The temporal design of the work is especially effective: dense, exciting moments of movement and rapid change are contrasted with sparse, mesmerizing drones amidst gradually evolving inharmonic spectra, much as the art of flamenco juxtaposes frenzy and repose, passion and calculation. The whispered intonations, disappearing snippets of transformed singing, and raspy textures of strummed guitars bring the work to its conclusion and a final solo recitation that poignantly hearkens back to the strains of flamenco singing at the opening of the work.
Given the opening excursions into the sounds of Spanish culture, the next work on the disc demonstrates a strikingly different facet of Mr. Verandi’s electroacoustic practice. Heartbreaker (1996) is based on the activity of breaking objects “and the various forms of energy that are freed by this phenomenon.” Meticulous and extensive exploration and transformation of a particular family of sources materials, from the breaking of bricks and glass to the tearing of paper and the crushing of leaves, produces an extremely rich and varied palette of sonic objects that the composer employs with clarity and imagination. Warring pulse-driven ostinati transform into thunderous, swaying waves of low-frequency crunching, then into a tremulous, fragile tinkling that betrays the violent origins of the sounds. The work is a sonorous delight and is formally coherent and shapely. The recognizable hammer- breaking-brick at the conclusion seems rather too literal and banal after the riches offered up during the preceding ten minutes.
Faces and Intensities (1996) is another of Verandi’s prize-winning works (Musica Nova 1996) and another that delves into the abstract exploration of a sound’s transformative potential. The guiding model here is that of continuity: slow, methodical transformations, changes of speed, adjustments of spatial movement and focus. The work proceeds in slowly evolving arches of increasing and decreasing energy, never resting long enough to establish a point of reference, always remolding the temporal flow and spatial arrangements of its contributing materials. There is an intensity and complexity to this shifting, kaleidoscopic ambience that holds the listener in a suspended oscillation of expectation.
The final piece on the disc, Plastic Water, is one of the most recent offer ings, hailing from the year 2000. The work was conceived as an eight-channel work designed for performance on the Sigma 1 diffusion system at TU-Studios Berlin. The stereo version presented on this disc makes one yearn for the opportunity to experience the original multichannel work. The composer once again brings his considerable technical prowess to bear upon a simple sound source (the crushing and squashing of a plastic bottle) and squeezes out some beautiful timbral objects via his sound transformation practice. The “water” of the title informs the iterative pattering that dominates many of the textures in the piece and an evocative plastic bottle “solo” draws the work to its somewhat premature conclusion.
The works on orillas distantes / distant shores are now, in some cases, nearly a decade old. These works by Mario Verandi maintain a vivid and visceral quality that encourages repeated audition, and makes one eager to explore the composer’s more recent work.

More information about each track on www.marioverandi.de