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The son of a Breton and an Algerian, Ned Bouhalassa buried his mongrel pedigree in the ascetic study of audio phenomenology. Electroacoustics promised to release forever those troubling sentimental attachments he had to music. In the tradition of Dhomont, Bouhalassa’s assiduous experiments in acousmatic art conjured stark and disconcerting works. Attraction is his nihilistic apogee, reducing all existence to magnetic impulses that collide violently or hurtle away.
As the attention and the kudos crackled down on him in the rarefied ground-zero of a multi-speaker acousmatic array, Bouhalassa’s appetite for musical adventure forced him out into the streets for fresh sustenance. Soon, he would be found flipping through the chart-toppers at the record store and wigging out to Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Public Enemy, admiring their volatile and spontaneous sonorities and passion. There is plenty for an electroacoustician’s ear in this music, if you don’t mind it ringing after the show. Over the years, Bouhalassa’s work in film, television, and multimedia soundtracks has considerably broadened his interests and compositional palette. His recent work revels in this cross-genre electronic sensibility.
Ned Bouhalassa, along with Alain Thibault and Louis Dufort, is among a new group of electroacoustic composers that is stepping away from its sound-dissecting apparatus and venturing downtown to mill among the undergrads at steamy venues. The science of sound is being practiced expertly and with great sophistication in the commercial music industry — and these new composers thrive on the amazing innovations and creative energy of this voracious business.
Aérosol shows the evolution of a humble young composer from the grim satisfactions of academic rigor to the burgeoning suppleness of his present work. Jets is ideal chill-out music, cinematic, atmospheric and ceremonial, recatalyzing the coherence of past impressions in wonder. Visionary sound stimulus for all citizens of the future.
Bruce Gottlieb, Montréal [x-98]
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