Jocy De Oliveira
“Wave Song”
From Estórias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos E Eletrônicos
(Fif) 1981 (Blume) 2017

In 1961, Jocy De Oliveira presented her piece “Apague Meu Spotlight” (“Turn Off My Spotlight”) in partnership with Luciano Berio, which became the first electronic music concert ever held in Brazil, making De Oliveira a fundamental figure in the history of electronic music in the country. In the years since, she has become a prolific composer, pianist, and filmmaker. “Wave Song” is part of the album Estórias Para Voz, Instrumentos Acústicos E Eletrônicos, released in 1981 during the years of Brazil's military dictatorship, featuring a set of four electroacoustic pieces that mix various influences. In “Wave Song”, we are presented with a didgeridoo sound that expands through resonance, accompanied by a string textures, piano, and synths that become percussive by the end of the track.

Vânia Dantas Leite
“Di-stances”
From Música Eletroacústica Brasileira Vol 1
(Sociedade Brasileira De Música Eletroacústica) 1996

When I first heard this piece, I thought it sounded like the moment when heavy rain stops and you can feel immediate peaceful contrast with the air against your skin. Later I found out that the piece she composed was based on a score drawing by Paulo Garcez. In Paulo Garcez's score, watercolour drawings are added to a traditional score, showing little coloured mountains along what looks like downpours of moons and heart-shaped drops, indicating when the sound goes up and down. In “Di-stances”, the Brazilian pianist and electroacoustic composer creates a sound interpretation of the drawings with an initial undulating sound that goes up and down, while fragmented rain-like sounds fall all over the sound spectrum, occasionally interrupted by sustained, eerie tones.

Nelly Moretto
“Composición 9b”
From Various – Musica Electroacustica
(Municipalidad De La Ciudad De Buenos Aires) 1970

Nelly Moretto was a composer and pianist from Argentina who worked at the Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute (ITDT), one of the epicentres of electroacoustic and avant-garde music in Buenos Aires. In her piece entitled “Composición 9b” (1966), we first hear a woman’s voice saying clearly, “Apenas conozco el espacio... sin embargo viven los pastos” (I hardly know the space... but the grasses are alive). Moretto then manipulates the voices with magnetic tape until they become unintelligible and ghostly whispers, playing with the speed and reverberation of speech. According to the author Marcela Laura Perrone – the first researcher to offer an account of Moretto’s work – “Composición 9b” was made with the voice of Lucía Maranca reciting poems by Gustavo Moretto.

Beatriz Ferreyra
“UFO Forest”
From UFO Forest +
(Room40) 2023

UFO Forest + is one of a series of anthologies of previously unreleased material by Argentinean composer Beatriz Ferreyra, released by Room 40, collecting “her practices in tape based music and also computer based works”. Although Ferreyra has had a prolific career since she first joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in the 1960s, becoming a key figure in electroacoustic history, in recent years releases from Editions Mego, Recollection GRM, and this collection from Room40 have made her work more accessible to a wider audience. “UFO Forest” (1986) is delicately crafted, creating a dense atmosphere in which some elements emerge in the foreground, such as the sonic chirping of bird-like sounds, descending objects and strange ethereal voices, all of them together evoking a complete landscape.

Ileana Perez Velazquez
Celia (1994)
(Unreleased)

I came across this piece by Cuban composer Ileana Perez Velazquez when it was presented at the 2017 Biennial for Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, described in the program as “a tribute to Celia Cruz and her Cuban roots”. Perez Velazquez employed convulsive techniques to process the sample of Celia Cruz’s voice saying the word “soy” (taken from Cruz's song “Azúcar”.) According to Ileana Perez Velazquez, whom I personally interviewed for the book: “Cuban music is reflected in all my works. The rhythmic element is very important, sometimes more present than in others. In the work Celia, I was thinking how a person like Celia, who has been away from Cuba for so long and yet maintains that strong identity in relation to Cuban music and with herself as a Cuban person.”

Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet
“A Los Olvidados” (1971)
From Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet (música acústica, mixta y electroacústica)
(Self-released)

Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet was a composer, pianist, organist, harpsichordist, and conductor from Montevideo with a diverse range of musical interests, including popular and avant-garde genres, particularly electroacoustic music. “A Los Olvidados” was recorded using percussions, synthesizer and reverb. According to Sofía Scheps, who researched and wrote on this piece, “In “A Los Olvidados”, Pietrafesa recontextualises this recording and integrates it into a new sound palette processed in the studio (percussion and synthesizer) to build a new electroacoustic piece: a new sound world emerges from the combination of different times and spaces — a new world which will resonate in other times and places.”

Oksana Linde
“Playa Caribe”
From Aquatic And Other Worlds
(Buh) 2022

Oksana Linde is a scientist and composer born in Venezuela in 1948 to Ukrainian parents. There are other composers of early electronic music from Venezuela – like Adina Izarra, for example – but we wanted to feature Oksana Linde in the book to look at the time when synthesisers became affordable and portable, focusing, for this purpose, on the Venezuelan electronic music scene in the 1980s. We also found Linde's story compelling, as a woman who was unable to maintain an active career in the 1980s and only edited her debut album in her seventies, in 2022. Natasha Tiniacos, who interviewed the composer, wrote about this song: ““Playa Caribe”, named after an idyllic Venezuelan beach close to Caracas, is a rhythmic mixture of pulsating radar and sustained effervescent chords alternating between a lighthearted and an uneasy mood.”

Teresa Burga
“Mensaje 4 (De 4 Mensajes)”
From Estructura Propuesta Sonido: Piezas Para Instalaciones Y Composiciones Con Notas Alazar (1972​-​2017)
(Buh) 2023

The work 4 Mensajes (4 Messages) (1974) is interesting as an audio documentation. It is the audio recording of the installation piece that included text, video, photographs, and audio by Teresa Burga, a Peruvian multimedia artist. Here, the artist uses television news as input, which are distorted and fed back, making them barely intelligible. According to Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, who writes extensively about this piece in the book, “Listening to Message 4 immediately reminds us of modern telecommunications systems and their instability: we recognise ambient sounds that harbour characteristically human voices speaking words that reach listeners as incomprehensible. Distorted as if the signal that reproduces them was badly captured or as if other signals had intervened, making it impossible to decode the meaning they were meant to transmit.”

Jacqueline Nova
“Oposición – Fusión” (1968)
From Creación De La Tierra–Ecos Palpitantes
(Buh) 2022

Jacqueline Nova was a Colombian composer and artist, and a key figure of avant-garde music in Colombia during the 1960s. She was born in Belgium. Nova graduated in musical composition in 1967 and received a scholarship from the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) from the Torcuato di Tella Institute. The piece “Oposición – Fusión” was taken from the album Creación de la Tierra–Ecos Palpitantes, which was edited under the curatorship and research of the Colombian composer Ana María Romano and recovers Nova’s most important electroacoustic works.

Switched On: The Dawn Of Electronic Sound By Latin American Women by Luis Alvarado & Alejandra Cárdenas (Editors) is reviewed by Mike Barnes in The Wire 483. Read the article in print or online with a Wire subscription.