Jacques Bekaert – S/T

Originally released in 1981 on the Belgian Igloo label this reissue comes with the same sleeve as originally designed by Alain Géronnez. “A Late Lunch” is the soundtrack to Akiko Iimura’s eponymous movie realized in 1978. It is based on acoustic instruments and field recordings, brilliantly reconfigured and mixed by Bekaert to create a surreal, immersive soundscape. The technique used includes superposition and speed change of recordings, radical sound effects, and juxtaposition of sounds. The players were prominent musicians of the 1970s, including Maggi Payne, George Lewis, David Rosenboom, and Blue Gene Tyranny. “A Summer Day at Stony Point” was composed in 1969, with participation of David Behrman, Shigeko Kubota, and Charlotte Warren. The piece was commissioned by English composer Hugh Davies who presented it at the Harrogate festival the same year. Stony Point is a small village in New York State where John Cage co-owned a small pseudo-commune art resort where like-minded artists gathered. “A Summer Day at Stony Point” is nothing more than a page of a journal, a fragment of a notebook that utilizes a series of sound sources recorded at Stony Point on one beautiful day in the summer of 1968. Other electronic sound sources were recorded at the Brandeis University where Alvin Lucier was professor. The final realization of the piece was done at Henri Pousseur’s APELAC Studio in Brussels, 1969. The soundtrack for Akiko Iimura’s Mon Petit Album was composed on the basis of a simple description of the technique of the film and its time span. It includes David Behrman on alto, from an outdoor recording at Stony Point, plus excerpts from a Transition concert in London, the band Bekaert formed in 1971 with Michel Herr, Takehisa Kosugi, and Ryo Koike, both members of the Taj Mahal Travelers. The atmosphere is quiet and pastoral throughout with a very dreamlike flavor. Edition of 500.

“… Gentle threads of instrumental and electronic sounds are mixed with outdoor rural field recordings and occasional voices of his friends speaking, whistling or singing. Bekaert creates a warm environment within which we can hear subtle individual voices of good musicians who are relating to his loosely-notated scores and verbal instructions…” –David Behrman