Rapid Eye Movements

This CD contains 4 works composed by Roger Doyle between 1968 and 1980, remastered in 2002. The earliest piece is the Piano Suite, composed when he was 19/20, and the latest Rapid Eye Movements, his attempt at a 'masterpiece before the age of thirty' .

Upon its initial release in 1981, the UK Sounds magazine wrote: 'without doubt one of the most exhilerating LPs and unorthodox concepts ever submitted to vinyl'.

Programme Notes

The Piano Suite was composed whilst studying composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The second movement was composed in a hotel room in Paris, away from a piano. It incorporates some 12-tone techniques and pays its conscious respects to Debussy. Melody in the third movement is derived from the name Dominique, using middle C as the letter A. Using the same idea (not an original one) the name Annick is also buried in the second movement. You can work out the surnames if you have that kind of brain. It was recorded at Archie Simpson's 9th Lock House on the Royal Canal, Dublin.

Originally Why is Kilkenny so Good? was based around an interview with a 13 year old drug addict, recorded off Irish national radio. When I asked for permission to use the recording I had made I was refused, so my flat-mate Johnny Robinson and I re-constructed an imaginary interview to replace the radio one. It is one of the very first tape pieces I composed.

Fin-estra was recorded at the Experimental Music Studios of Finnish Radio, Helsinki, where I spent a year on a Government scholarship. It was revised at the studios of the Institute of Sonology at the University of Utrecht, Holland.
Studio transformations of a recording of my 'All the Rage' for symphony orchestra, accompanied by the sound of children playing outside the studio window.
Fin: Finland.
estra: orch-estra.
Finestra, fenetre: window.

Rapid Eye Movements was awarded a First Mention at the 1981 Bourges International Electro-acoustic Music Competition, France.
Human beings experience two types of sleep, which are categorised by the eye movements associated with them: REM (Rapid Eye Movement or dream sleep) and non-REM. In REM sleep, beneath the eyelids, the eyes move around just as if their owner were wide awake and watching something.

This 30 minute piece is constructed in eleven seamless sections, which I called: Mix 1 (overture), Beach 1, Mix 2 (at 6'49), Beach 2, Edit 1 (at 11'55), Edit 2 (this is where I placed the track split to break up the 30 minutes), Voice improvisation, Mix 3 (related to Mix 2), Bedroom 1, Mix 4 (which arrives back to the end of Beach 1), Bedroom 2..
Also, woven into the piece are dozens of aural deja vu moments, where sounds heard before re-appear in different contexts.

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