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Early in 2002 Concerts M in Montreal commissioned a new work from Roger Doyle for the Voyages - Montreal/Dublin festival.

Working with the creative possibilities of software which captures sounds like a freeze-frame in video, making sound movement stop, or go forwards or backwards slowly, Roger Doyle composed a 12 minute piece Passades which was premiered at that festival ('Irish music -if you say so' was the newspaper headline which covered the festival). A Passade is an equestrian term meaning to move backwards and forwards over the same space.

Seeing great possibilities of exploring this technique further, Doyle has continued to work on the Passades, sketching out 2 hours of material, in mainly 2 and 3 minute sections.The process has been to try to find connections between them even as they proliferate. The result of this coalescing has been a series of sets containing 3 or 4 related Passades each.

In the Spring of 2003 a music video was made by Tim Redfern called 'Earth to Fire Passade', which was an early version of what was to become the 'First Set' of the Passades. View here. 

This was expanded into a 25 minute looped video installation called 'Milieu' commissioned by the City Arts Centre's 'Haunted' series for the Dublin Fringe Festival in October that year. View here.

By the Autumn of 2003, 49 minutes of them were 'finished' (4 sets plus an Opening and Closing), although Doyle tends to find important small connections in pieces which need time to be discovered, which greatly improve them - revising pieces several times before he thinks of them as being 'really finished'.

A CD was released free with the third birthday issue of the Journal of Music in Ireland (November 2003) of these gestating 49 minutes, a work-in-progress.

Released in 2004 on the Amsterdam-based label BV Haast is Passades - Volume 1 the revised completed 49 minutes, together with Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI the piece Roger Doyle was commissioned to compose to celebrate the bi-centerary of the French Revolution, in 1989.

'His sensitive ear produces captivating results'... from a review of Volume 1 in The Wire Magazine UK August 2004.

Operating Theatre, the music-theatre company co-founded by Doyle and actress Olwen Fouere, produced a show called 'Passades' in an abandoned warehouse in The Digital Hub in Dublin in 2004. The review in the Sunday Independent of May 30 reads:

"an experience so profoundly moving, intellectually stimulating and visually devastating that nobody who saw it will be able to forget it for a very long time".

Passades - Volume 2 was finished in March 2005 - running to about 64 minutes, bringing the total of both volumes to 113 minutes, or just under 2 hours. In May 2005 Tim Redfern, commissioned by the Crash Ensemble, made a music video of 'The Sixth Set' from Volume 2. View here. Passades - Volume 2 was released shortly afterwards on CD by BV Haast.

"...informed as much by Ambient electronica as musique concrete, this is a strong document of Doyle's openmimded and unpretentious compositional approach...the results of the processing are dreamlike and gorgeous...the missing link between Pierre Henry and The Orb perhaps?"
... from a review of Volume 2 in The Wire Magazine UK August 2005.

In January 2006 Doyle began the final and most ambitious section of the Passades, called 'The Ninth Set'. It was completed in July 2007 and is 67 minutes long. It was released in November 2007 on the German label Die Stadt.

 

Interview with Roger Doyle in Musique Machine (April 19th 2005) on Passades and Babel

Interview with Roger Doyle as 'composer of the month' (Sept. '05) by the Contemporary Music Centre.

 

 

background photos © Tim Redfern