Philip Samartzis - environments, electronics
Günter Müller - selected percussion, ipod, md, electronics
Andy Guhl - cracked everyday-electronics
Norbert Möslang - cracked everyday-electronics

Originally conceived for eight-channel surround sound playback, Soft and Loud is comprised of field recordings made in Japan between 1999 and 2001 that were later arranged and mixed in Melbourne over a three year period. The objective of the field recordings was to document a variety of common environments in order to investigate the behaviour of singular events and their relationships to other sounds occupying the Japanese soundscape. Of particular interest is the cohesion with which artificially generated sounds are incorporated within the generally subdued natural acoustic environment.
However intriguing the artificial is, the strangely muted quality of Japan is also a source of fascination. A massive city like Tokyo can be thunderously noisy, however it has a calmness to it that can be quite unsettling. It is the intersections where the distinctions between the artificial and the natural, noise and silence are blurred that drew Samartzis' interest when constructing this work. Soft and Loud is the first release to be published on Samartzis' Microphonics label, and is the first in a series of works based on his investigations into surround sound spatialisation for installation art.

t r a c k l i s t :
1_   dark woods.  25m50s

2_   heart of france: coeur de france
     part 1.- bourges.  26m43s
     part 2.- hérimoncourt.  22m00s

1_ recorded at the danish centre for electroacoustic music, aarhus. denmark july 1997.
2_ recorded at the insitut international de musique electroacoustique. bourges, france june 1997.
3_ recorded at the cicv centre de recherche pierre schaeffer. hérimoncourt, france june 1996.

"Samartzis was once half of the duo Gum - those down under types manipulating and recycling vinyl before the word DJ was a superstar. Now Samartzis is still a composer, but one of the more serious composed electro-acoustic, musique concrete. His first solo CD (actually the first to come in Dorobo's Limited Editions series) has three long pieces of samples in conjunction with environmental recordings. I hear mumbling among you: we've seen that... true, but Samartzis does something new: his samples are short, like only a microsecond, and repeated. These samples take shape in a block as they are and then, as suddenly as they appeared, they disappear. Only to be followed by fairly long passages of environmental sounds, and, in the first piece, spoken word. It's a strange mixture that surprisingly works well. It takes a few rounds of listening, before one gets into it. And to that extent it might never work for some." [Frans de Waard - Vital Weekly 120]