Michael Edwards

Apagón

Programme Note

CD available from Sargasso

Apagón is a collaborative project made with the pianist and composer Marco Trevisani, who I met at Stanford University, where we were both working for a number of years. Our collaborations started back in 1994, but really took off with the composition of segmentation fault beta 1.1, which we prepared whilst still at Stanford and which was the impetus for the creation of this CD.

The CD was made in Havana, Cuba, in September of 1998, at the invitation of the Laboratorio Nacional de Musica Electroacustica in Havana, where we did most of the recording and mixing. The percussionist we worked with was Diego Ruíz, known to the world as Habichuela, and the engineering was performed by Darío Nuñez. Marco and I did all of the mixing and mastering.

The title Apagón means "blackout" in Spanish, and refers to the many problems caused by frequent power cuts during the production of this CD in Havana. Such problems were always treated with humour and patience by the locals, if not by the uptight (northern) European who often felt it was just an impossible task to get something done in this environment. Things were made worse by the appearance of Hurricane Georges towards the end of our stay, which cancelled our scheduled concert and put the fear of God into our aforementioned uptight (northern) European. Again, the locals treated this force of nature with humorous disdain.

Despite everything though, we managed to finish the project whilst still in Cuba and so both Marco and I would like to thank the staff of the Laboratorio Nacional de Musica Electroacustica for making this possible, in particular Enmanuel, Zenaida, Darío, Julio and Ania.