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Because I don’t have any sort of music-related academic qualifications (unlike some of my Splendid peers), I was a little bit nervous about reviewing something by a founding member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community. Luckily, my fears about what to do if I didn’t like Volt were mooted by the fact that it’s a wonderful, dynamic album, full of motion and energy and thought and collisions of harmony and dischord that are enjoyable even if you’re not writing a dissertation about them.
Concerto pour piano MIDI mechanizes the classical concerto format, and features a human soloist attempting to keep pace with an electronic ‘performer’ not limited by human constraints like physical speed, finger length, and so on. Le soleil et l’acier (Sun and Steel) combines Asian gamelan-type sounds with undulant keyboards, intermittent electronic percussion and an otherworldly soprano — even at its most random, it’s a thoroughly engrossing piece. OUT builds a futuristic keyboard tale over four parts, using a Ronald Reagan sample and a variety of sharp ‘orchestra-hits’ and percussive melodies. ELVIS (Électro-lux, vertige illimité synthétique), based on Timothy Leary’s eight mutation phases of life, is a faux-orchestral vision of dischordant, seething beauty, and as for the closing piece, Volt… you’ll have to hear it for yourself, on the Boombox. If the whole electroacoustic thing seems a little too pointy-headed to you, this is the disc that’ll show you how wrong you are.
Some music can be truly characterized as striking. Alain Thibault’s new album Volt, brought to us by Canadian publisher empreintes DIGITALes, really packs a punch. It positively pounds!
The opening piece, Concerto pour piano MIDI, follows the classical concerto schema, but the computer driven synthesizers and sequencers drive us into a decidedly contemporary space. Jacques Drouin does an admirable job of sticking with what Thibault himself describes as “the nightmarish precision of tape.”
E.L.VI.S. (Électro-lux vertige illimité synthétique) harnesses a team of willing saxophonists (Quatuor de saxophones de Montréal) to the synthesized plough and turns over some pretty unexpected ground: texts of songs made famous by Elvis Presley are synthesized and used as a rather touching foil for soundscaping (like landscaping…)
Approximately equidistant between Ian Hammer’s Miami Vice theme and Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, Thibault’s work chisels itself into our edgy modern consciousness, leaving a mark deeper than we might feel comfortable with. How many volts in a hammer, anyway?
Né à Québec en 1956, Alain Thibault a étudié la composition à la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal. Il est lauréat du concours des jeunes compositeurs de Radio Canada en 1982, dans la catégorie électroacoustique.
Sa muslque peut étre qualifiée d’électro-instrumentale, car elle prend sa source dans les musiques pop, Rock et Jazz qu’elle cherche à pousser à l’extrème en utilisant les synthétiseurs, l’échantillonneur et les possibilités de programmation qu’offfent l’ordinateur. Naît une musique syncopée, secouée de rythmes frénétiques, cybernétiques, une musique qui s’écoute à cent à l’heure, agressive et trés séquencée. On pense aux expériences jusqu’au-boutistes de Frank Zappa et à ce que pourrait composer un ordinateur possédé par les esprits de Schönberg et Front 242.
Finalement, ce disque me fait le même effet qu’un chœur d’orchestre classique chantant des Gospels à Moscou. C’est vraiment bizarre et on se demande dans quelle dimension on est tombé.
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One of a series of discs from Canada’s DIFFUSION i MéDIA, the organization behind the empreintes DIGITALes label. The basic thrust of the two recent series is the continued exploration of sound via electronics, and an effort to bring real electronic music into the present day. Which means, of course, that everything from MIDI to the kitchen sink gets involved, with sometimes astonishing results.
Volt is cause for astonishment indeed, partly in its immediacy and listenability. The latter effect is close to baffling when you consider that the opening piece is the thirteen minute Concerto pour piano MIDI in which pianist Jacques Drouin is faced with the task of keeping pace with a wildly programmed array of synthesizers and samplers — it’s a piece that takes the tack Frank Zappa has taken with his Synclavier work on albums such as Jazz From Hell, but with a slight but important difference: here there’s a live performer working in response to the programming. As the liner notes mention, that introduces an element of danger and an element of tension. Fortunately, Drouin is up to the challenge involved.
In Le soleil et l’acier soprano Pauline Vaillancourt is the human element balanced in a desolate vocal balance against the electronic instruments and racketing percussion. The piece suggests narrative, strangely enough, possessing the resonances of a good movie score for a thriller. Instruments float in and out of the mix, swirling about the pinned voice and dissipating again. It’s an oddly exciting piece, all tension and danger, remarkable, immediate and clever.
OUT, on the other hand, an abbreviated version of a video opera exploring the idea of virtual reality as a way of life, is somewhat less successful. Much of the piece is dependent upon Fairlight sampling and trickery, so that the sections of the piece often sound like Art Of Noise run amok, particularly in the opening section, built around a quote from Ronald Reagan. There are some interesting sounds and ideas, but it doesn’t quite get all the way through, the piece falling prey to its own facility for flexing in any given direction.
ELVIS (Électro-lux, vertige illimité synthétique)> on the other hand is structured for electronic instruments and saxophone quartet and has an air of deep dark mystery about it, rather in the way of jazz turned on its head and then warped out to some other place. Here Thibault takes to long tones, electronic vocals, staccato overlays from the saxes, galloping percussive sections that seems almost normal at moments, before whirling off to some other time, space and meter. As much of a pun as the title is, the music also manages a few puns here and there, ricocheting from musical ideas that are comfortably familiar. It’s a very dynamic piece.
Volt manages tc conjure up the image of electricity, though in the context of a mad scientist’s lab (the synthesized harpsichord voice and the Simmons tom tom samples may be responsible for this image). It spends most of its ime leaping about between ideas and variations on those ideas; often with a sense of computers out of control as pieces of the music suddenly speed up, slow down, speed up, slam to a stop. At first it seems as though it is never going to connect the dots… and then, one by one, the dots start to blend out and together, making a coherent sense. It’s musical illumination by machine, of course, hung on a popping, growling bass and tinkly, flashing marimba sounds, sort of a dance mix from hell. There’s more than a little of that Zappa connection again — there are sections of this piece that have the same sort of clean-edger lunatic avant-jazz sense to them, especially with the marimba going full tilt.
If exploring modern electronic music is something you want to do, I can recommend this album as an excellent starting place — it’s out far enough that it’s fascinating and fresh, but connected enough to the real world at odd points that it will not drive away the curious looking to see what all the noise is about.
Volt, do compositor Alain Thibault, è um trabalho provocador no modo como mistura o Piano, o quarteto de sopros e as gravações. Um contraste abrupto e constante entre o silencio e o som sendo este cortante e incisivo, de forte pendo; percussivo. São audiveis as influências do rock’n’roll no modo energético e urbano com que Thibault aborda as estruturas das suas composições.
Existe um mundo inteiro à espera de ser descoberto. Aqui falou-se apenas de uma meia dúzia de nomes, que podem até nsm ser os mais representativos, pois o conhecimento da divulgação destes trabalhos acaba sempre por ser bastante limitado, devido a uma certa marginalidade que este tipo de música enfrenta nos meios de divulgação «oficiais». O interesse deve ser despertado — peio menos e esse o objectivo deste texto. O resto fica ao vosso critério.
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It was a surprise to listen to Thibault’s cd. Whereas the music of the other cd’s was based on soundscape, on Volt we hear something quite different. Structure and tempo are most important. Thibault has written for MIDI-piano, saxophone, soprano and tape. There is a lot of persussion, obviuosly digital, with very fast and intricate rhythm patterns. Thibault combines rock, jazz and “studio-pop” in compositions with names like ELVIS (Électro-lux, vertige illimité synthétique).
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