Włodzimierz Kotoński, "Electronic & Instrumental Music" [CP-107]

Włodzimierz Kotoński’s name came up on my radar screen after hearing his masterful scores to Jan Lenica & Walerian Borowczyk’s 1959 film “Dom” & Lenica’s 1963 film “Labyrinthe.” His bubbling Musique Concrète constructs imbued a certain Eastern-European twist on the decidedly Western-European modes that all-but defined 50s & 60s tape-music & the scores hold their own alongside Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani, & Robert Cohen-Solal’s contemporaneous experimental short-film-score work.

This, a Creel-pro of his only LP release – issued in 1975 by the state-run Polskie Nagrania Muza label, along with a 7” “radio single” of “Aela” – offers two tape pieces rendered in the early 70s at the Polish radio studio & the GMEB, the first of which, “Aela” heavily utilizes band-pass filtering & assorted “Spectral” processes to yield a shimmering, yet iterative wall of pure electronic sound ala Arne Nordheim’s contemporaneous work – incidentally also composed at the Studio Eksperymentalne & the second, “Les Ailes” using only a trio of EMS Synthi synthesizers, an incredibly rich blast of pure analogia that rivals even canonic Synthi-worship by the likes of Ákos Rózmann & the EMS Stockholm “Massive.”

The set is concluded by two chamber pieces, “Music for 16 Cymbals and String Orchestra’s” gaseous enharmonic shimmer echoes Penderecki & the more lyrical “Wind Quartet” hints at Prokofiev.