There is something appropriately mischievous about calling this record "A Distracted God". Beatriz Ferreyra has spent more than six decades treating sound as if it were a substance capable of escaping whatever container humans have designed for it, and these three pieces suggest that the gods of electroacoustic music may indeed have misplaced the instruction manual. Born in Córdoba in 1937 and based in France since the early 1960s, Ferreyra studied with Nadia Boulanger before entering the orbit of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. She later worked at the GRM, participated in the development of the "Solfège de l'objet sonore", taught electroacoustic techniques and eventually pursued an independent practice in which tape, instruments, computers, memory, spirituality and sheer sonic curiosity could coexist without asking permission from one another.

"A Distracted God" is consequently not an attempt to summarise that career, nor does it behave like a museum display in which three carefully labelled relics sit behind glass. Its three works, spanning 1976 to the later decades of Ferreyra's practice, make a rather more provocative point: the technology changes, but the ear remains recognisably the same. Earlier writing on her music has repeatedly noted precisely this peculiar continuity, with works separated by decades retaining a common fluidity and an ability to make sounds seem simultaneously physical and strangely unplaceable.

"Souffle d'un Petit Dieu Distrait" is the obvious gateway into this universe. Originally realised in the late 1980s and subsequently revisited, the piece moves through a dense constellation of electronic events, with sounds appearing, multiplying, retreating and crossing the stereo field rather than obediently lining up like soldiers waiting for inspection. There is an almost biological quality to the motion: things seem to grow, mutate, collide and disappear before the ear has quite decided what they are. Descriptions of the piece have emphasised its unusually active spatial movement and its mixture of tiny sonic details with broader, more enveloping masses.

What makes it particularly striking today is that it doesn't sound like a reconstruction of “the future” imagined by the 1980s. It sounds as though the future has simply continued without bothering to announce itself. There are crystalline fragments, electronic traces, granular disturbances and sudden shifts of perspective, but little sense of technological exhibitionism. Ferreyra is not showing us what machines can do. She is showing us how easily the ear can be fooled into believing that machines, insects, weather systems, distant transmissions and miniature planets might all belong to the same family.

Then comes "Tierra Quebrada", dating from 1976 and written for violin and fixed electroacoustic sound. Commissioned for the A.C.I.C. in France, the work was premiered in Paris by violinist Manuel Enriques, and its very premise already creates a useful tension: the recognisable physical gesture of a violin placed inside an environment that refuses to remain recognisable.

Here Ferreyra allows friction to become structure. The violin doesn't simply float above an electronic backdrop, nor does the tape behave like a polite contemporary-music accompaniment waiting for its soloist to finish. Bow, scrape, attack and resonance encounter altered sonic matter, producing contrasts between something bodily and something apparently disembodied. At times the music seems almost geological, as if the title were less metaphor than instruction: the ground has fractured, and the violin is trying to discover whether the pieces still belong to the same planet.

This is also where the age of the work becomes audible, but not necessarily as a defect. There is tape grain, physical roughness and a certain resistance in the materials that contemporary digital production often spends considerable effort pretending to possess. Ferreyra doesn't need to manufacture “organic” imperfection because the machinery has already supplied it. The result is less polished than tactile, and that tactility gives the piece a curious sense of danger.

"Sourires d'Automne" closes the record with only four minutes at its disposal, which is roughly the amount of time Ferreyra needs to remind us that brevity does not oblige a sound to behave. The piece belongs to her later exploration of fixed electronic sound and was composed for a festival context in Brussels, originally for Francis Dhomont's 80th birthday. Here the materials feel more concentrated, more elusive and perhaps more sinister. Instead of developing a large architecture, Ferreyra seems to open a small trapdoor in the floor and invite the listener to inspect whatever is moving underneath.

That sense of scale is central to "A Distracted God". Ferreyra's music repeatedly makes the microscopic feel enormous and the enormous feel intimate. A tiny change in texture can acquire the weight of an event; a broad electronic mass can suddenly reveal itself as a collection of minute particles. Earlier commentators have noted how her compositions can operate simultaneously at micro and macro levels, while maintaining a remarkably strong internal flow despite their lack of conventional musical signposts.

This is perhaps why the record feels less “experimental” than perceptual. The word experimental suggests that something is being tested, as though the composer were standing beside a laboratory bench with a clipboard. Ferreyra seems to have little interest in such bureaucracy. Her concern is what happens when sound is allowed to become unstable without becoming meaningless. Tape can become memory; a violin can become landscape; an electronic pulse can acquire something resembling weather. The source material matters, but its identity is never allowed to become a prison.

There is also a quiet philosophical dimension here. Ferreyra's work has long been associated with spirituality, alchemy, Kabbalah and the transformation of matter, but these references are most useful when understood not as decorative mysticism but as ways of thinking about change. A sound is never quite what it was a moment before. It can be stretched, layered, displaced, broken apart and recombined until its origin becomes irrelevant. In that sense, her musique concrète is not really about concrete things at all. It is about the strange moment when the familiar loses its passport.

And perhaps that is where the title finally makes sense. The distracted god is not necessarily an absent god. It may simply be one who has stopped paying attention to the categories humans invented for sound. Ferreyra's music does something similar. It refuses the tidy distinctions between analogue and digital, natural and artificial, instrument and environment, composition and accident. Her career has moved through technologies that were once futuristic and are now archaeological, yet the central question remains stubbornly contemporary: how much reality can be extracted from a sound before it stops being merely a sound?

"A Distracted God" offers no tidy answer. Thankfully. Answers are terribly overrated, particularly in experimental music, where they tend to arrive wearing black turtlenecks and carrying a press release. What Ferreyra offers instead is a listening space in which sounds can remain strange, physical, comic, threatening, beautiful and unresolved.

Six decades into a career devoted to reshaping the audible world, she still seems less interested in conquering sound than in letting it misbehave. That may be the most convincing kind of modernity there is.