Kaleidoscope CD/DVD-ROM/Internet release:
'
Three new releases by the Pogus label and the first one is a CD and DVD by Peter Batchelor. The DVD has the original 8-channel piece of 'Kaleidoscope', but I don't have the playback for such a thing, so I am stuck with the stereo version. I never heard of Batchelor, who is a composer from Birmingham, UK and who studied with Jonti [sic] Harrison and Andrew Lewis. He works 'predominantly with fixed-media, his output ranges from two-channel 'tape' composition for concert diffusion to large-scale multi-channel installation work'. Playing with a prismatic toy as a kid inspired 'Kaleidoscope' and perhaps it's not difficult to see that relating to the music piece. Just like light makes different colours of different intensities, so that this music move back and forth, from front to back and back, top to bottom, left to right. I can surely imagine how this sounds on an 8-channel set-up: even better than it does on a stereo version, I imagine. This is from the world of serious electronic composing, say the world of Canada's Empreintes Digitales, but whereas works released over there are not always to my liking, I surely liked this one a lot. The gliding of tones, the processed white noise, the overall vibrancy of the pieces, the constant motion of the sounds used. This is all in the world of computerized sounds, I would think, and whatever went in to generate this sound material is something we not longer can hear. And perhaps it's also something that one should not care about? It's the result that matters and that result is great. (Vital Weekly 929)
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