Oscar van Dillen

“The new BIG STORIES are all told by science, their scope is vast, and their telling has only begun relatively recently. We are daily getting updates on answers to all the ancient basic questions of life that inspired human art, cultures, and religions for millennia, and we are getting verifiable answers this time. Most important is perhaps that we are also facing completely new questions.

It is high time the old myths and beliefs are abandoned and replaced by contemporary, that is to say: scientific sources of information, imagination, and inspiration. The vast field of modern science is far more complex, has a verifiable and direct relation to reality, and it offers a far greater abundance of possible stories and references for artists in all disciplines than any older belief or myth system, however poetic, could ever come up with[1].

In our times we need new and innovative operas and symphonies, whether electronically or no; let these forget the simpler stories of our past and use these new narrative sources of our present and future for reference and inspiration.”

–Oscar van Dillen

In the recording, four sections are presented, along with a complete track containing Radium uninterrupted. This last is for reasons of streaming media reacting to tracks: some insert pauses which should not be there, others change volumes of individual tracks, deviating from the overall balance decided by the composers/producers. Whatever streaming service you listen to, the complete track should provide a reliable reference for the composer’s intentions.

The four sections can be viewed, and even treated, as parts, yet are not called that way. The overall form is that of an archipelago of musics, consisting of the same and similar elements yet in endless variations of balance, pitch, register and gesture. In between these islands of music is silence, not a cold digital silence, because there is a residue of noisy digital circuitry ongoing mostly beyond the horizon of perception, but a musical silence, part of the music itself and precisely timed. These General Pauses are an integral part of the Archipelago-Form of Radium.

Beryllium (Be) is the lightest of all the alkaline earth metals, and a strange one as it does not form ions. It is a rather rare element too, named after the precious stone beryl, a gem, from which it can be extracted with great difficulty.

Beryllium is unusually rare for such a light element. Almost all larger than Hydrogen elements are formed in stars, as a consequence of the nuclear fusion in their core, but in this too Beryllium is an exception. Along with Lithium and Boron, atoms of the element Beryllium cannot survive long inside stars and will form other elements before being ejected into space. It is assumed therefore that Beryllium is formed in interstellar dust clouds instead, by the influence of cosmic rays splitting up heavier elements.

The meaning of the term electronic music has changed dramatically since modern composers started to work with electronic equipment in radio studios after the second world war. In the 50’s and 60’s of the 20th century it meant mostly avant-garde esthetics by an elite group of mostly male composers making the headlines for this at the time niche medium. Today the term changed meaning but at the same time its history is in the process of being rewritten as more and more female composers are being credited for having played a defining role in the development of the medium. In 2021 the acclaimed documentary film called Sisters with Transistors was released, it demonstrated this process for a larger than specialist audience. One can also conclude that on the whole and over time the term electronic music defines a medium, not a style.

A reflection of and on the volatile basic nature of the element Phosphorus can be found in the sparkling and resonant distorted sounds used overall. In all three parts a variety of rhythmic elements arise and decay. In view of the overall presence of the complete spectrum of sound, this album comes close to being a kind of sculpted noise.

This has been achieved in two ways: by sculpting noise from various sources (white, pink, brown) into resonances, and by sculpting and distorting resonances and sounds into noisiness. Both latest and more traditional electronic modular technologies have been used to achieve this.

Among the inspirations for this album have been works such as Sisyphus by Pink Floyd (which was on the very first record the composer ever bought in his life), Free Form Guitar by Chicago, and the overall sound explorations of many of the later Jimi Hendrix solos. Van Dillen found works such as these to capture best the basic nature of the character of the element Phosphorus in sound.

One of the main aims when creating Azote was to create a music in which sounds move musically, and where the pitches are not the necessarily most important sound aspects, but sound, register and dynamics are, and it was composed so that each sound has its own sense of space with it. Also sometimes these spaces move independently within the music, allowing for sounds to enter and sound in these spaces. Thus beat becomes breath, or the lack of it. Although at first hearing it appears that rhythm is the main musical area explored, deeper listening reveals that the music is happening within the virtual spaces created by what we can call breathing rhythmic bubbles of sound. The importance of the sense of architectural space gives Azote aspects of soundscape, but the fact that these spaces are formally treated and move about in an overall very rhythmical way, points again to a possible symphony. But these are mere words, insufficiently able and possibly obsolete to describe let alone categorize this music.