> The music is great, but video... It is worth to know that the Suite has an exact narrative. According to Jean-Claude Risset: "this music I composed for the play Little Boy by Pierre Halet. The theme of the play is the revival of the Hiroshima bombing in the form of a nightmare of Eatherly, the pilot of a reconnaissance plane who later developed guilt jeopardizing his mental health. Fall corresponds to the release of the bomb. The pilot thinks that Little Boy, the bomb with which he identifies himself, is falling - in fact this is a psychological collapse that never reaches any bottom. To illustrate this, I have produced a paradoxical glissando, which appears to glide down for ever amidst more normal tones. This is accomplished by ganging together a number of octave components, as pioneered by organ makers such as Callinet centuries ago and by psychologist Roger Shepard with the computer, and used in instrumental music from Bach to Berg and later my own Phases for orchestra".
> Little Boy was realized at Bell Laboratories. All its sounds have been produced with the MUSIC V program. The Computer Suite is excerpted from music composed for the play Little Boy by Pierre Halet. The theme of the play is the revival of the Hiroshima bombing in the form of a nightmare of the pilot of the reconnaissance plane, who later developed guilts jeopardizing his mental health. The Suite attempts to roughly sum-up the movement of the play; it comprises three parts. The first section, Flight and Countdown, follows the pilot's dream, which takes him through a musically stylized plane flight, with inharmonic textures, episodes of synthetic jazz and japanese-like tunes.The flight is terminated by a count-down preceding the release of the bomb. The following section is the Fall. The pilot thinks that Little Boy, the bomb with which he identifies himself, is falling - in fact this is a psychological collapse that never reaches any bottom, hence the endless descending spiral. The last part is called Contra-Apotheosis like the anti-climactic end of the play. Here various time fragments are recalled or evoked in a deliberately desintegrated way, as the obsessions of the central character and his entire world mentally rotate.Thus the jazz band gets mixed up and ends as a gun-like beat; the Japanese instruments turn into sirens; a siren glides upwards yet becomes lower and lower; a pandemonium of sounds builds up above a rotating glissando, to be quieted down and dissolved into memories.
