A very weird mix of various sampled and looped craziness… mice squeak and transmute into rusted chair castors, with soundscapes that are so surreal that they took me to many realms; not least so that some of this sounds like out-takes from the Magic Roundabout. It does sound like lots and lots of other explorations in sound and noise as art, but this is a very good one. Some of this comes close to INA GRM releases that I’ve heard, which is no mean feat.
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A l’heure où on ne cesse de nous farcir les esgourdines avec les nouvelles technologies et où un sampler se vend plus vite qu’une Fender, une clique de musiciens s’échine à jouer des platines comme on joue de la guitare: avec les dents, le coude, le coeur. La compilation, Turntable solos témoigne de cette scène vivace où seuls les disques des autres sont joués, découpés, bref, massacrés, pour les plus bizarres des sensations auditives. Christian Marclay, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide… quelques noms de cette nouvelle tendance sont présents dans les plages de ce CD, détournant à l’envi disques de jazz ou d’effets, scratchant à qui mieux-mieux, bouffant presque le diamant.
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Martin Tétreault, Canadien timide, préfere profiter de sa collaboration avec Otomo Yoshihide, pour scratcher plus que de raison tandis que ne viennent le pertuber que quelgues rares citations. Tétreault, on a pu le voir sur scène, a tendance a jouer au tennis avec des bras de platines, le nez collé au rond central. Cette vision différente de la musique, entre Dee Nasty et Marcel Duchamp, signe ici son plus grand méfait: celui d’envisager autrement l’art de composition. A découvrir, les oreilles curieuses.
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This latest CD from empreintes DIGITALes of recent works by the talented Canadian composer Robert Normandeau is a most welcome addition to their electroacoustic music catalogue. It includes two prize winning pieces: Le renard et la rose (Golden Nica award winner at 1996 Prix Ars Electronica) and Figures de rhétorique (1st Prize for mixed music at the 1998 International Musica Nova competition), as well as two other works that haven’t won any awards — yet!
Le renard et la rose was a 1995 ICMC commission, and continues Normandeau’s cycle of works inspired by vocal onomatopoeia which began with Spleen in 1991. The later work is very much a continuation of the earlier: both are works for tape alone and use processed vocal elements to build pulsing rhythmic and sonic structures which speak directly of human emotions in a way that recognisable words never could. By contrast, Figures de rhétorique (1997) is a purely abstract musical discourse for tape and piano — and the composer is at pains to point out that this is primarily a tape work with part for piano, rather than the other way around — commissioned by Jacques Drouin, the pianist in the current recording. As always, Normandeau’s approach is an acousmatic one, with his sonic materials carefully honed and arranged to present as much of their inner meaning to the listener as possible. The ‘figures of speech’ of the title determine the relationship not only of the sounds to one another within the tape part, but also the discourse between tape and piano throughout the unfolding of the work’s four movements.
The longest of the works on this CD is the 19-minute tape work Venture (1998), constructed entirely out of material derived from fragments of progressive rock music of the late 1960s and 70s. This is, however, no excursion into the realm of plunderphonics, but a very personal homage to the profound influence which that musical genre had on an entire generation. As a clever touch, considering its importance as an inspiration to many popular musicians of those years, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition also features throughout the work. It also inspired the structure of Venture, with an ever-present movement, Tunnel, linking the work’s other movements in the manner of Mussorgsky’s Promenade. While Venture may evoke the spirit of progressive rock, as presented, very little of the source material is recognisable (although I did detect some clear Pink Floyd in a couple of places, in addition to the Mussorgsky) and its sound world remains pure Normandeau, suggesting that the work is as much autobiographical as musico-historical. Being of Normandeau’s generation myself, I found it to be an intensely moving work, providing a powerful reminder of the aspirations of 1970’s youth from a late 1990s musical perspective.
The closing work on the CD, Ellipse (1999), represents a return to more abstracted musical form. Another tape work, this time constructed entirely from guitar sounds, Ellipse continues to explore the ‘figures of speech’ analogy of the earlier Figures de rhétorique. Originally commissioned by Arturo Parra to form the tape part of a work for tape and guitar, Ellipse took a different direction from that work (L’envers du temps) to emerge as a solo tape piece, representing the composer’s half of the intended musical dialogue: as the ellipsis of the title, “omitting… elements of meaning,… allowing the interlocutor, the listener, to fill in the blanks.”
It is good to see empreintes DIGITALes continuing to fill in the blanks…
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Ah, the weird sonic world of empreintes DIGITALes, with an ever growing catalogue of curious and creative music. […]
As ever all their CD’s are fascinating inventions in sonic art and electroacoustic music.
Daoust is a name we’ve encountered many a time before, and this new collection of works (dating 1986-94) shows him at his best in melding sound into a melodic/amelodic texture. Each of the six tracks has a different focus: Impromptu celebrates discovery with diverse sonic coincidences, Il était une fois… (conte sans paroles) is a brilliant piece of deep resonant cosmic music, Mi bémol sound like a little avant-garde firework display, Résonances presents a carillon of bells in a variety of mutations, Water Music whilst being constructed from water sounds is not quite what you’d expect (I won’t spoil the surprise), and then finally we have Fantaisie in which Daoust lets all his ideas run free, as a sort of bizarre sonic movie. All fascinating stuff, and largely original in style and conception.
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Jacques Tremblay apparently had his whole concept of music changed when he heard Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen, and it shows in his own music as heard here. A collection of six pieces (dating 1990-95), Tremblay’s art is not as refined as Daoust’s, but he’s gaining a focus that’s individual. I really wanted to like Tremblay’s creations, but his total disregard for any musical context meant that much of the disc, lacked the focus I feel such sonic art needs to actually work and hold the attention.
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