Velocity
for stereo tape • June 1996, 10' • for my parents
NOTES • REVIEWS
"Velocity", by Peter Batchelor, offers a fanciful
environment of cold metal, flavored lavishly with quiet power. It seeths with
an edgy danger. Its premise of velocity gives rise to a speed animation respective
of context, rather than respective of fad or aesthetic bandwagons - a futurist
piece.
- Extract from CD review of Maximal Music - II CIMESP 1997 by Jim Phelps
Peter Batchelor’s "Velocity" is also long, in
a compilational sense, with just about 10 minutes. The title gives some hints
as to the character of the piece, which starts head-on with a sudden rush
of turbulent liquids, maybe even water… On a backdrop of a continuous
murmur, small, close events take place in rapid successions, making me think
of methods developed by Swedish guru Pär Lindgren, who started a whole
electroacoustic movement with his "Rummet" ("The Room")
(1980), which is still unsurpassed in this sub-genre of electroacoustics –
but Peter Batchelor’s contribution is very much up to it too, skillfully
applying his version of this background-foreground technique, which indeed
is very effective and can be varied in numerous ways. Batchelor also inserts
concrete sounds, like doors slamming, subway cars wheezing through tunnels
and so forth, but shortly transposing these events into the realm of bent
perception, where mirrors bulge and melt in Salvador Dali-related sceneries.
"Reality" mixes with "un-reality" in this piece, and now
you understand it and now you don’t – and this is one aspect of
the electroacoustic tool, which fascinates me most; the gliding, shimmering
passage in and out of wack!
- Extract from CD review of Presence II, A Compilsation of Electroacoustic
Music by Ingvar Loco Nordin
a 'ballistic rollercoaster ride'
- Extract from CD review of Presence II, A Compilsation of Electroacoustic
Music by Ross Bencina
Velocity, by Peter Batchelor, begins in the lower ends of the
spectrum, with a single massive ‘wave’, which is then expanded
into a complex textural set-up. The spectrum is slowly expanded to include
wider bandwidths, alternating between the stasis of textural material and
the activity of strong gestures reminiscent of the original opening. As Batchelor
himself proposes in the programme notes, this work explores just such type
of contrast: the sonification of movement and stagnation. Towards the last
quarter of the work, the interaction between the two types of material seems
to become more intricate: instead of simply giving way to their counterpart,
static and dynamic sections seem to engender each other, to be the cause of
their antithetical manifestation.
- Extract from CD review of Presence II, A Compilsation of Electroacoustic
Music by Rajmil Fischman (2001).
