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Douglas Lilburn: Complete Electro-Acoustic Works

In 1965, when Douglas Lilburn, the doyen of NZ orchestral composers, created his first major electronic work in the studios of Radio NZ, our musical landscape was changed forever. Lilburn never looked back, and continued to work exclusively in electronic music (including founding Victoria University's electronic music studio in 1970), until his death in 2001. Atoll has celebrated those years by issuing a labour-of-love 3-CD-plus-DVD set containing all of his electronic work. It's breathtaking in its scope and beautifully packaged. All the pioneering work that influenced later composers like Jack Body, John Rimmer and Phil Dadson is here: found sounds, sampling, spoken word, birdsong, self-generated sounds (banging on cans, for example) and so on. So too are the exploratory techniques: splicing, filtering, and soundscaping using entirely synthetic materials. But what's more important here than the techniques is the inspiration which, thanks to the anarchic nature of electronic music, is not the preserve of the classicists alone. There are moments here that wouldn't sound out of place in compositions by Salmonella Dub, Shapeshifter, Rhian Sheehan and Chris Knox. That first major electronic work, The Return, is here, and so too are the studies that preceded it, 'Five Toronto Pieces', which include a setting of Denis Glover's Sings Harry, probably the first NZ electronic composition. The DVD contains rare film, an interview with Jack Body, and a previously unreleased attempt at a four-channel composition. This is a huge oeuvre, exhaustive and exhausting. You may notice that it took two of us to review it. It's that big. Respect.

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