[reviews] afe102lcd
john hudak: miss dove, mr. dove

Hudak's methodology is to distil natural sounds into musical soundscapes, and he tends to operate at the quietest ends of the audio spectrum. "Miss Dove, Mr Dove" is no exception; he recorded and processed the sound of doves cooing in the resonant space between two buildings - he also recorded traffic and conversation from passers by, though there's scant evidence of that on the finished work.

It sounds like he's allowing the birdcalls to trigger piano and flute sounds, thus ironing out their microtonal detail and teasing out the melodic content of birdsong. The end result is a charming, if rather inconsequential work.

In his favouring of lighter sounds and his unwillingness to cloak his methods in forbidding theory, Hudak comes across as the anti-Francisco López, despite the similarity of their processes. It's diametrically opposed, in sound terms at least, to Merzbow's take on birdsong below. Who could imagine that two works taking their cue very obviously from Messiaen's "Catalogue d'oiseaux" could proceed along such utterly different lines?

[Keith Moliné]