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31 July 2000
By Richard di Santo in Incursion Music Review (Canada), July 31, 2000

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“Lussier is an accomplished innovator in dreaming up new methods and techniques for guitar improvisations, and, though not particularly to my taste, these 14 tracks are certainly food for thought.”

The solo disc by René Lussier presents fourteen improvisations for electric guitar as they were recorded in 1998, without any sort of montage or overdubbing. Lussier utilised eight microphones for the recording, giving these improvisations the appearance of a more elaborate montage. A diagram shows where the microphones were placed. Most of them are placed at various points in the room, some mono and some stereo, but the eighth microphone was placed outside of the recording room! Improvisations for guitar are by no means a rare commodity in the musique actuelle scene these days, and it has taken me some time to be able to listen to this record and approach it with some degree of objectivity. That being said, at first I didn’t find much that was very intriguing when I first listened to this disc. A certain playfulness in the performance and the interesting use of the 8 channels were all that I could see. But when I approached this disc again, it suddenly opened up (or, perhaps it was I who suddenly opened up) revealing much more than the mere playfulness I had suspected. Only then was I able to perceive a more deliberate method in Lussier’s playing and a certain richness in the wide range of sounds that issue forth from his axe. Lussier is an accomplished innovator in dreaming up new methods and techniques for guitar improvisations, and, though not particularly to my taste, these 14 tracks are certainly food for thought.

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31 July 2000
By Noah Wane in Splendid E-Zine (USA), July 31, 2000

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“… wonderful ethereal, disembodied quality that is so characteristic of acousmatic music.”

In the tradition of French musique acousmatique, cinema for the ear, comes Kristoff K.Roll’s Corazón Road. It is a musical travel diary of the duo’s trip through Central America — but don’t worry, it’s more interesting than your aunt Twilla’s slide show of her trip to Palm Beach! What Kristoff K.Roll’s members Carole Rieussec and Jean-Christophe Camps do here is more of an artistic impression of their voyage than a travelogue. The piece’s five movements each have a distinct personality and seem to correlate with distinct legs of the journey. Everything has that wonderful ethereal, disembodied quality that is so characteristic of acousmatic music. I like Belize City, with its strong Jamaican flavor, and Guatemala, which starts with the sounds of torrential rain and ends with the fascinating sounds of some kind of local evangelical tent meeting.

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2 July 2000
By Richard di Santo in Incursion Music Review #006 (Canada), July 2, 2000

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“… rich aural textures…”

If Bernhard Günter’s time, dreaming itself struck me as having an acutely visual effect on me as a listener, then Darren Copeland’s Rendu visible takes this theme and makes it his most explicit concern. Drawn from entirely environmental sounds, the pieces presented on this disc are rich aural textures suggesting a most intricate visual environment. Sounds of rushing water, the wind, clusters of birds, voices, cars, and a host of other mysterious and visually suggestive sounds populate the three works on this disc, composed between 1993 to 1996. For all their aural wonder, these recordings remind us that even if we are standing in the apparent ‘quiet’ of a desolate wooded area, if you start to pay attention you realise that what you perceived as quiet is actually full of life and sound.

In the liner notes to the disc, Copeland describes his theory that “a composition using real world sounds is able to re-awaken latent visual imagery in the mind of the listener, as if this disc was really an empty canvas or a fresh stock of film, [where] soundscapes furnish the listening imagination with a magical lens for viewing invisible worlds.” Indeed. And this accounts, says Copeland, for the ubiquitous visual analogies used by so many acousmatic composers in the titles or program notes for their works. Copeland takes this notion one step further, though. He seems to have an implicit desire to stimulate specific visual images and meaning through his works, though he admits his limitations:

It is virtually impossible for me, at the present time, to stipulate what visual image or associated meaning is being evoked for any person at any particular moment on this disc. Not until credible studies are undertaken about the imagination’s ability to visualize from sonic sensory input alone can I comfortably approach composition outside the realm of musical abstraction.

But this for me represents a darker, more autocratic side of musical expression that I prefer not to endorse. To accomplish this wish of being able to stimulate specific visual responses in the mind of the listener is to rob the listener of his autonomy, to rob him of the chief pleasure of listening, which, like reading, allows the listener to make free associations and respond to a piece on his own terms, contributing to an open ‘dialogue’ between composer, music and listener. This idea takes the concept of musical rhetoric — which, of course, is already an immensely suggestive medium, which already directs the imagination in extremely powerful ways — one serious step further. A step I’d rather not see taken. You can set up your piece in whatever manner you like, build the most contrived listening environment, feed your listeners with descriptions, images, and suggestive sounds. But let the listener explore what he is given at his own pace, and with the freedom of his own perception and sensibilities. Otherwise, what you’re left with is a row of rotting cabbages. Hardly what you’d call a listener’s utopia.

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1 July 2000
By Phil England in The Wire #197 (UK), July 1, 2000

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On his third solo album The Death of Analogies, Christof Migone updates the fast edit, low tech musique concrète he developed in his works for campus radio CKUt FM in Montréal Migone delights in audio detritus — the kind of entrails others leave on the cutting room floor. In its intimacy, his debut Hole In The Head was reminiscent of Adam Bohman’s home dictaphone recordings in the way it featured his own voice or body sounds, the voices of callers to his radio show, and sounds from domestic life Death uses much the same sources as Hole but strips them of any character that might identify them, somewhat blunting his idiosyncratic edge and pushing him towards the overpopulated area of electroacoustic music If he has subjected his latest sonic miniatures to greater computer intervention, they nevertheless retain the dirty, visceral quality of his earlier album: glitch done ugly. The slightly longer explorations of a new suite called Post-Mortems nudge his work closer towards musical forms, despite its patina of vinyl surface noise.

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1 July 2000
By Phil England in The Wire #197 (UK), July 1, 2000

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Less engaging is Undo, Christof’s duo with Alexandre St-Onge Like St Onge’s last solo record, un sperme features recordings made entirely from inside the mouth Though this information is not given on the sleeve, it is crucial in understanding these highly minimal explorations The duo’s variations on the ’microphone in the mouth’theme (tape hiss on max, mumbled voices, sub vocal sounds,

etc) are like so many shades of grey Appropriately enough, the track titles are taken from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable And the grey cover is something Beckett himself might have’warmed’to.

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1 July 2000
By Geert De Decker in Sztuka Fabryka (Belgium), July 1, 2000

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“This CD is just wonderful…”

This CD is just wonderful, that is the only way how we could start this review.

Darren Copeland’s compositions are made entirely from environmental sounds. Which results in atmospheric music. Five compositions are there on the CD, sometimes you wonder to be in a somehow dark atmosphere surrounded with the sound of extincted annimals. A soon later you are in the middle of a beautifull nature with full of tranquillity. Sounds from nature comes and go combined with unknown sounds that all brings an other dimension in the atmospheric compositions.

This CD is just wonderfull, that is the only way how we can end this review.

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