I fell in love with Madrid almost as soon as I arrived in 1967. I felt well here, which was no small matter for an eleven year old living in his sixth country. That feeling, not of belonging but at least of wanting to do so (something that had not happened in all of my previous places of residence), encouraged me to learn a new language, make new friends, discover a new city and deal with an adolescence I'd rather not even describe.

I returned to Madrid in 1989, eager to rediscover it and to make a place for myself here as a musician. What I actually discovered was a new love for this city, so in 2004, when the electronic music studios in Albi-Tarn (GMEA), France, awarded me a Commande d'état (a commission from the French Government) to make a work and premiere it at their annual festival, Rencontres de musique et quotidien sonore, I decided to make a suite of sound portraits of Madrid. That explains the French title, Lieux, which would otherwise be rather incongruous for such a quintessentially Spanish work. After the French premiere, I brought Lieux home, performing it at Madrid's Reina Sofía Museum on June 19, 2006. The present recordings are from that Spanish premiere, which was part of the XIII Jornadas de Informática y Electrónica Musical organized by the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea (CDMC).

These are three pieces in which I improvise freely with bass clarinet and alto flute over (and in) sound collages I made with field recordings from around Madrid. In some of the latter, I was also playing, so there are places where my instruments are sounding live and in the recordings at the same time.

I designed this piece to work in four channels, not just to give the sound collages greater clarity and spatial definition, but also to deconstruct the centrality of the woodwinds. Six microphones were assigned to different parts of the bass clarinet, which was fitted with a straight bell made specially for me by Sébastien la Fontaine at Selmer, in Paris, and four to the alto flute. This allowed me to distribute the instrumental sounds among the four channels, creating a sense of movement more coherent with the spatiality of the collages. I'm happy to say that quite a bit of this is audible even in the present stereo version.

These three pieces were created with all the subjectivity normally associated with the genre of portraiture, especially when the artist is in love with his model. And among my many sound portraits (of the Brooklyn Bridge, of New York City, the Canary Islands, Lisbon, Aragon, Michoacán, and so on), they may well be my favorites. They date from my final period playing woodwinds, when I was already approaching them as "acoustic synthesizers" rather than primarily as melodic instruments, although there is plenty of melody here, as well. That, and the structural use of recorded sound collage, clearly foreshadow my subsequent return to the electroacoustic media with which I have been fascinated since 1964 when, as a child living in Britain, I first heard Delia Derbyshire's brilliant theme music for Dr. Who.

I hope you enjoy them.