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2LP
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VCR 013LP
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Arguably one of the most important experimental records to emerge from 20th century Ireland, Thalia, as featured on the Nurse With Wound list, is coveted for its inventive, unpredictable, near-psychedelic brilliance, yet has remained scarce due to major label politics, meaning listeners had to fork out a ton for a second hand copy. Now readily available on its intended format, the keening, breezy logic and abstract theatric dramaturgy of Roger Doyle's work on Thalia has been reshuffled to highlight its apparent surreality and frolicking apparitions. Combining his studious research and prep work at Utrecht Institute of Sonology (then home to Roland Kayn, Leo Küpper, Jaap Vink) and the studios of Finnish Radio (Yleisradio) Helsinki with a finely honed improvisational intuition at his home studio in Malahide, Dublin, the record yields a poetic diffusion of electro-acoustic phantasms meshed with politicized and unsettling field recordings, alongside a mad, experimental solo piano piece. The three-part title track is the biggest attraction on Thalia. Acting as a sort of shamanic extension of Gaelic bardic traditions, Doyle guides the listener through labyrinthine dimensions, vacillating tape FX with stark synth pulses, fragments of "Danny Boy", and the unsettling sound of a woman wailing or even keening (a lament for the dead) in only the first minutes, the piece spirals over two sides between obtuse electronics and jump-cuts to melancholy strums, airborne melody, and rabid dissonance with the natural quality of Ireland's ever-shifting interplay of sun, rain, and clouds. The relatively brief "Baby Grand" follows as a sort of playful solo piano palate cleanser for the LP's purest electronic piece "Solar Eyes", which surely recalls the iridescent expanses of Roland Kayn or Jaap Vink's cybernetic music as much as Coil's pHILM #1 as ELpH (1994). Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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CACK 024LP
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Cacophonic presents a reissue of experimental Irish avant-garde and electroacoustic innovator Roger Doyle's Oizzo No, originally self-released in 1975. This manifesto of outsider orchestrations, teenage symphonies and cultivated concrete is Doyle's debut album. A pianist and composer, Doyle was also an improvisational jazz drummer with a penchant for experimentation that would marginalize him from traditional seats of learning in his native homeland but embrace him to the bosom of Europe's leading forward-thinking research centers for electronic and computer music. Here he would piece together two highly sought-after experimental albums before returning home to channel his multi-disciplinary work ethic into the agit-pop theatrical company Operating Theatre and play a leading role in the burgeoning Irish new wave scene as an early signing to U2's Mother Records. Oizzo No is a collection of some of Doyle's earliest works as an indomitable scholarship student of composition at the Royal Irish Academy Of Music in Dublin and then as founding member and drummer of experimental jazz rock outfit Jazz Therapy (who would later become Supply Demand & Curve). This patchwork 1975 debut draws from what was an already bulging portfolio that included academic assignments, living room compositions and soundtrack collaborations with Irish filmmakers. Originally part-recorded and subsequently aborted when the would-be label vanished without trace overnight, Oizzo No was shelved indefinitely until a scholarship at the prestigious Institute Of Sonology at the University Of Utrecht in Holland afforded Doyle not only the opportunity to partially revise his humble opus in their state-of-the-art studios (as well as those of the EMS Studios in Stockholm) but also the money to press a limited run of 500 copies and help further cement the foundations of his future status as one of Ireland's leading and most versatile contemporary composers.
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CD
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DIESTADT 103CD
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"Irish composer Roger Doyle's first release on Die Stadt is his prize-winning work The Ninth Set, a 67-minute masterpiece in 5 parts. He was awarded the Magisterium Prize at this years' Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition in France for parts 4 and 5. The award, which is one of the most important prizes in the world for electronic music, is open to composers having at least 25 years of professional experience in the field, and its objective is 'the promotion and diffusion of works that might become milestones in the history of electro-acoustic music.' Previous works of Doyle include a 5CD set Babel which took ten years to compose, where each track corresponds to a room or place within an imagined tower city; and the 3 hour Passades, music made from software that freezes sounds like a freeze-frame in DVD. He's also known for his project Operating Theatre which released the classic Rapid Eye Movements album -- consisting of 4 works composed between 1968-1980 -- on Steven Stapleton's (Nurse With Wound) own United Dairies label in 1980. Furthermore, he guested on Fovea Hex's Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent EP number 2 Huge, alongside (among others) Clodagh Simonds, Brian Eno, Percy Jones and Colin Potter. The CD comes in a color digipack in a first edition of 600 copies."
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CD
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BVHAAST 1505
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Roger Doyle (solo piano); Produced and composed by Roger Doyle. "Among my first piano compositions was Six Pieces for Pupils who Don't Like Exams. Baby Grand is the sixth of these and is composed for four hands (in this version I multitracked myself and used some double-speed recording techniques). ... Then in the 1980s I received two once-in-a-lifetime commissions ... The first was to compose music for a film by Irish film-maker Bob Quinn, called Budawanny. The music (which had to be piano music) was the play a central tole in this film, which was shot as a silent movie in black and white with captions appearing when people spoke. It required seventy minutes of music to be composed for it - uninterrupted by anyone talking over it (a composer's dream) ... The second commission was from Dublin's Gat Theatre to compose music for a production of Oscar Wilde's play Salome, which required a piano player onstage throughout the show, playing non-stop for almost tow hours. For this Baby Grand CD I have included five pieces from that suite, but have replaced 'Salome's Dance' with a new version recorded in concert in 2003. 'Mansard' is from a 5CD set called Babel which took me ten years to compose (1989-1999). Each track corresponds to a room within an imagined giant Babel tower." --Roger Doyle, Autumn 2005.
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CD
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BVHAAST 0304
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Featured pieces: "Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI" (1989, for electronics, voices); "Passades -- Volume I" (2002/3, for electronis, transformed voices). Peformed by: Roger Doyle (electronics); Olwen Fouere, Paavo Evans-Doyle, Kathy Kennedy, Paul Dutton, Roger Doyle (voices). Produced and composed by Roger Doyle.
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CD
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BVHAAST 0505
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A new work from Roger Doyle ( for electronics & transformed voices). Produced and composed by Roger Doyle. "I began Passades in early 2002 working with the creative possibilities of music software which captures sounds like a freeze-time video, making sound movement stop, or go forwards or backwards slowly. For raw material I used extracts (four seconds at a time) from previous compositions of mine which were fed into the software which would freeze them, and by mouse manipulation I would slowly move the material backwards and fowards onscreen to see if there was potential for keeping those particular extracts. On a trial and error basis I collected almost three hours of material in this way over a period of two and half years ... I have introduced the three 'Link/Separators' and a piece from 2000 'The Idea and its Shadow' as contrasting material ... There is an ancient voice in this music which seems to travel through the present into the future, then back again into the past." -- Roger Doyle, Spring 2005
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CD
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SIDO 012
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"The music on this CD represents the early works of Irish composer Roger Doyle -- pieces composed in the late 1960s to mid 70s, re-packaged and re-mastered in 2002. It includes his extremely rare self-released 1975 debut LP Oizzo No and his second LP Thalia from 1978, originally released on CBS Classics, all on the one 77 minute CD. The earliest piece is Bitter-Sweet Suite for out-of-tune piano composed when he was 18, and the latest Thalia, his first large-scale electronic piece, composed at the age of 26. Doyle is most well-known for his United Dairies' Operating Theatre masterwork Rapid Eye Movements, his third LP. Thalia/Oizzo No contains his work leading up to this legendary piece and fills in the picture of his early development. Beautiful, totally strange stuff."
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2CD
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SIDO 009
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"The music on these CDs was composed on a Fairlight Computer Music Instrument between 1983 and 1988. Together with the Synclavier (made famous by Frank Zappa's use of it) the Fairlight was among the first synthesizers controlled by a computer. It had a sampler, a sequencer (called 'Page R'), on-screen waveform display -- very popular with bands on Top of the Pops showing off their new Fairlights -- and a central processor unit (CPU) that took two people to lift. In 1982 I was involved in a studio that bought one, and after two months teaching myself how to use it I warmed to its possibilities and limitations. There were things it did that no other piece of equipment has done since, yet at the same time I was forced to input material into the sequencer monophonically. The sequencer held up to eight monophonic lines, forcing me to think contrapuntally. This 8-voice polyphony was like having a constantly changing chamber octet at my disposal. By 1988 it was gathering dust in the corner of the studio, having been superseded by newer technology and fashion, so I made an offer and bought it cheaply for my own embryonic home studio. In 1990 I sold it and it drifted out of my life. I made great use out of it -- sometimes composing pieces in a few hours -- and have very fond memories of the Fairlight."
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5CD
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SIDO 003/7
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A gigantic 5CD conceptual release by legendary Irish experimental composer Roger Doyle (previous albums on Christoph Heemann's DOM label; Doyle also recorded as Operating Theatre -- reissued on CD by United Dairies). "Babel is a large-scale musical structure making use of many technologies and music languages, with each piece of music being thought of as a 'room' or place within an enormous tower city. In the main section are 3 CDs where each track corresponds to a virtual architecture. The pieces are divided into two kinds: aural representations of actual spaces (e.g. The Dressing Room, The Stairwell, Mr. Brady's Room), and internalized dream spaces (e.g. The Room of Rhetoric, Mall Fountain, the Spirit Levels, the Mansard childhood memory room). Listeners can navigate their way differently through this CD building at each hearing if they so wish. The instrumental solos in some of these 'chamber musics' evolved in collaboration with the musicians and would not have been possible without the unique approach and talent of each performer. As a Babel 'supplement' are the 2 CDs of KBBL -- the Tower's fictitious radio station. Each of its 4 'shows' has its own style and atmosphere. Collaborating with DJs, actors, writers and singers, KBBL is made to sound like a real radio station with ads, traffic reports, phone-ins etc. There are also 'live' circus and nightclub recordings associated with KBBL in this supplement and in the main section. Other than these connections, and others not mentioned, Babel celebrates language (a slight variation on the Biblical morality tale) and musical expression in all its variety."
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