PETER ORINS - VRTN & VBTRN
Circum-Disc CD LX016
Peter Orins: Composition; vrtn - drums and electronics; recorded April 9 and 28, 2020; vbrtn - 3 floor toms, 3 cymbals, 3 wood sticks, recorded December 18, 2020
Recorded at La Malterie, Lille, France
France is possibly the world's leading country in Avant-garde art and music. Peter Orins is a drummer, one of France’s leading musicians in avant-garde music. He is frequently reviewed, perhaps because he has a long history of involvement in so many diverse movements in and around the ’Avant’ scene. After studies in classical music, he learned drumming in a rock school, then in the jazz sector of Le Conservatoire National de Région de Lille. He played jazz from the mid-1990s, also studying musicology at university, along with composition and improvisation.
Orins then spent years playing and collaborating with many projects including Toc, a free-rock, progressive band and diverse French-Japanese and French-Vietnamese ventures. At the same time, he was collaborating with and composing for various undertakings in animation and cinema, dance and theatre.
The drummer came to work on sounds in a purer way, his methodology investigating and pursuing developments in resonances, which came to yield Empty Orchestras (2014) from experiments with electronics and randomness, then Happened by Accident (2019). This latter has led to VRTN & VBRTN, the current release, in which he focuses (or not!) on chance, on accidental, acoustic exchanges between his drums and inanimate objects. VRTN is the ‘true’ development, being just drums and electronics, while VBRTN arises from three, floor tom-toms, three cymbals and three wooden sticks. These are used between a cymbal and a floor tom. Playing on the cymbal causes the floor tom to vibrate as well. In VRTN the electronics achieve the same effect. Orins uses Pure Data software and I presume that this controls or delivers the electronic effects required. Pure Data is an open-source visual programming environment. Known simply, also, as ‘Pd’, it enables musicians, performers and others to create software graphically, without writing lines of code. Pd can be used to process and generate sound, video, input devices and MIDI.
The two developments on the disc were achieved during the global lockdown resulting from the Corona pandemic. Both pieces are precisely composed improvisations and each tells its own story, which in both cases will depend on the listener. Please feel free to write your own!
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Circum-Disc CD LX016
Peter Orins: Composition; vrtn - drums and electronics; recorded April 9 and 28, 2020; vbrtn - 3 floor toms, 3 cymbals, 3 wood sticks, recorded December 18, 2020
Recorded at La Malterie, Lille, France
France is possibly the world's leading country in Avant-garde art and music. Peter Orins is a drummer, one of France’s leading musicians in avant-garde music. He is frequently reviewed, perhaps because he has a long history of involvement in so many diverse movements in and around the ’Avant’ scene. After studies in classical music, he learned drumming in a rock school, then in the jazz sector of Le Conservatoire National de Région de Lille. He played jazz from the mid-1990s, also studying musicology at university, along with composition and improvisation.
Orins then spent years playing and collaborating with many projects including Toc, a free-rock, progressive band and diverse French-Japanese and French-Vietnamese ventures. At the same time, he was collaborating with and composing for various undertakings in animation and cinema, dance and theatre.
The drummer came to work on sounds in a purer way, his methodology investigating and pursuing developments in resonances, which came to yield Empty Orchestras (2014) from experiments with electronics and randomness, then Happened by Accident (2019). This latter has led to VRTN & VBRTN, the current release, in which he focuses (or not!) on chance, on accidental, acoustic exchanges between his drums and inanimate objects. VRTN is the ‘true’ development, being just drums and electronics, while VBRTN arises from three, floor tom-toms, three cymbals and three wooden sticks. These are used between a cymbal and a floor tom. Playing on the cymbal causes the floor tom to vibrate as well. In VRTN the electronics achieve the same effect. Orins uses Pure Data software and I presume that this controls or delivers the electronic effects required. Pure Data is an open-source visual programming environment. Known simply, also, as ‘Pd’, it enables musicians, performers and others to create software graphically, without writing lines of code. Pd can be used to process and generate sound, video, input devices and MIDI.
The two developments on the disc were achieved during the global lockdown resulting from the Corona pandemic. Both pieces are precisely composed improvisations and each tells its own story, which in both cases will depend on the listener. Please feel free to write your own!
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
