Nobody — but nobody — makes music that sounds like Paul Dolden. His work typically exhibits unchecked exuberance, both his instrumental and electronic (and electroacoustic) music not merely firing on all cylinders, but with their inner workings ludicrously pimped and their processors absurdly overclocked, sounds and timbres piled on top of each other in extremis. His latest disc, Histoire d’histoire, on the Canadian acousmatic label empreintes DIGITALes, is therefore interesting as in many respects it shows considerable restraint. Much of the disc is devoted to Dolden’s five-movement work Music of Another Present Era, completed last year, in which he sets out to create a kind of deliberately inauthentic ethnographic artefact. Dolden uses our lack of knowledge about the music of ancient cultures to construct a free-wheeling flight of fancy, employing a “metaphoric use of myths” as inspiration rather than seeking to fabricate a pointless (and impossible) ersatz ‘reconstruction’. This imagined historical survey perhaps accounts in part for the demonstrable delicacy shown in this piece. Yet even from the opening moments, it’s unequivocally Dolden: microtonally unique instruments — implying the lack of a coherent, codified tuning scheme — wheeze into life as though summoning up their energy only with considerable effort, presenting a unified but ‘doddery’ demeanour. This is how first movement Marsyas’ Melodies begins (evoking the Phrygian Satyr who was supposedly the first to create music for the flute), eventually restarting in order to find some clarity, whereupon Dolden’s characteristic dense polyphony swells up, leading to Zappa-esque florid percussion and strangely agile stodge. Flutes are featured even more in third movement Entr’acte, in which a solid chorus of them is created, so compacted that they constantly clash and jostle and scrape against each other to the point where they can hardly move.

The ‘doddery’ demeanour i previously spoke of, the result of both density and microtonal confusion, continually rears its head, resembling the effect of amateur musicians struggling with both their instruments and their ideas (think of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, sight-reading), resulting in by turns amusing and charming acts of weird articulation that sound more than a little the worse for wear. As such — particularly in The Cosmic Circle Dance, one of the most exhilarating movements — there’s a joyous sense of music that needs several attempts from different directions or angles, crossed with a Harry Partch -like weird and wonderfulness that causes things to unexpectedly break off into a solo, or a twanging group of Jew’s harps. We speak of performers ‘playing’ their instruments, and a quality of play (in all its meanings) permeates every aspect of this disc, as it does with Dolden’s work in general. Yet while uproariously unhinged it may be, there’s an earnestness that keeps the music real, makes it more than just an extravagant piece of melodramatically theatrical nonsense. In a manner not dissimilar to Jennifer Walshe’s equally fictitious Aisteach project, one is caught up in the zeal and gusto that’s entirely genuine and leaves one wishing that these really were, in fact, the sounds from a long-forgotten age.

Comment créer une pièce d’opéra aujourd’hui pour la faire résonner frontalement avec le XXI^e siècle? C’est à cette question que tente de répondre la compositrice Annette Vande Gorne, appuyée par les textes du poète Werner Lambersy.

Faisant référence à la fête du sang qui se déroule chaque année dans certains villages péruviens, Yawar Fiesta est une œuvre étrange et envoutante qui travaille avant tout sur la spatialisation du son comme élément moteur, où chaque personnage trouve sa place à travers l’acoustique offerte par les possibilités des nouvelles technologies.

Annette Vande Gorne donne naissance à une œuvre forte et perturbante, empreinte de culture et d’histoire, qui n’est pas sans évoquer certaines formes baroques tout en les détournant de leurs origines pour les plonger du coté d’une électroacousmatique voltigeuse, où éléments musicaux et voix enregistrées se complètent en un tout résolument contemporain, employant les technologies actuelles pour en repousser leurs limites dans un contexte de performance.

Il est intéressant d’entendre comment chaque élément s’imbrique, Yawar Fiesta fonctionnant comme un tout, où vocaux et instrumentaux se multiplient et fusionnent pour former une matière abstraite à la force dérangeante et au pouvoir hypnotique, nous happant dans une zone cosmique habitée par des hommes et des dieux à la cohabitation suspendue à un fil. Étonnant.

Troy, NY — If you’ve spent any time at children’s birthday parties, you probably know what an inflated balloon sounds like when rubbed: harsh, squeaky, not particularly resonant.

“Rubbed-balloon sound” [used in Topology Chamber 2] might not seem like a sonic texture you’d place much stock in if you were creating a musical work. But how would that change if you were listening from inside the balloon? The composer Natasha Barrett decided to answer the question. She put a 3-D microphone in a balloon, pressed the record button and got down to some serious rubbing.

On Monday morning, at a “spatial audio” lecture at EMPAC — the experimental media and performing arts center that is part of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here — Ms Barrett’s interior-balloon 3-D recording was played in an acoustical marvel of a concert hall, outfitted with one of the world’s most advanced ambisonic systems.

As Ms Barrett’s 3-D audio file was piped into the loudspeakers — there are 64, positioned both around and over listeners — the sound of her balloon manipulations was enveloping. Smeared textures whipped around listeners’ heads along a wild variety of trajectories. Variations of pressure and phrase-length registered as legitimately musical. Discrete lines of vibration converged, with a triumphant air, before splitting apart again.

But there wasn’t much time to linger over Ms Barrett’s startling spatialized recording. Presenters and participants at EMPAC’s Spatial Audio Summer Workshop had a lot of ground to cover, and only five days to get hands-on experience with tools that are rarely available under one roof.

One goal of the workshop, the first of its kind at EMPAC, was to provide the nearly two dozen participants — including engineers, acoustic consultants and composers — with a rare chance to learn about working with what specialists call high-density loudspeaker arrays, like the one needed to play Ms Barrett’s recordings. Another goal was to present a pair of public concerts as part of EMPAC’s impressive, general slate of experimental music programming.

On Monday evening, the first concert was led, as was that morning’s lecture, by Markus Noisternig, an artist in residence at EMPAC who is a researcher from the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (or Ircam) in Paris. His lecture and concert highlighted both the ambisonic surround-sound speaker system and one of EMPAC’s new, and most highly prized, objects: a Wave Field Synthesis system. (These two discrete systems, which can also be blended, were temporarily installed at EMPAC’s concert hall.)

The wave system, a modular array of more than 500 speakers, uses acoustical trickery to reproduce organic sounds with unusually high fidelity. It can also “place” (and seem to move, quickly) those eerily lifelike tones at specific coordinates. Any but the most superficial kind of explanation of how this is possible tends to involve high math (like Bessel functions). But if you had to describe the effect, you might go for trippy and exciting.

Toying with spatially separated sounds is not a new fascination for composers. The conductor Alan Gilbert charted a lineage of such explorations in a 2012 New York Philharmonic concert, from a portion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. (Boulez being, not at all coincidentally, the founder of Ircam.) But as computing power has increased, digital systems have become more precise and more portable, if still expensive to design and install.

Systems like Wave Field Synthesis can also change approaches to pieces conceived using earlier technologies. A highlight on Monday night was Mr Noisternig’s presentation of Ricercare una melodia, by the composer Jonathan Harvey. This 1984 work was originally scored for a live trombone player and tape delay (with speakers bordering the audience on two sides). In what he called a new interpretation, Mr Noisternig looped the live playing of the trombonist Benny Sluchin using a 248-speaker section of EMPAC’s 500-speaker array, which was positioned behind Mr Sluchin.

Using Ircam-designed software, Mr Noisternig placed eerily live-sounding reproductions of Mr Sluchin’s playing at various points along the array. In most tape-loop performances, novice listeners can tell the difference between what is being played live and what is being reproduced electronically. But this “Ricercare” performance had a suaveness of blended tone that seemed both organic and otherworldly.

So, do you need a fancy hall with spatial-audio bells and whistles to appreciate these sounds? In an interview, Mr Noisternig said that the true nature of such pieces could not be appreciated in traditional stereo mixes. There are headphones capable of simulating 3-D audio — made more accessible by the boom in virtual reality technology — but they, too, provide only approximations of the concert hall experience.

He Slowly Fell and Transformed into the Terrain, a 2016 piece by Ms Barrett, received its American premiere on Monday night, courtesy of 49 speakers in EMPAC’s ambisonic system. It seemed like the most carefully designed entry in the program’s purely electronic portion — her whirligig 3-D designs rarely seeming to be in motion merely because the technology permits it.

Ms Barrett has posted an excerpt from a stereo mix-down to her SoundCloud account. You can listen and get an idea of her skills with dramatic build and textural variation. But as she notes on the site, about the stereo reduction (from 49 channels to two), “Mastering really tricky for this.”

During daytime studio sessions, the workshop’s participants developed their own approaches to the surround-sound systems installed in EMPAC’s studio and performance spaces. Carl Testa, a bassist and composer who works closely with the composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton, had brought along a vast collection of Mr Braxton’s recordings. On Tuesday afternoon, he was eager to test out the live-collage capabilities of Wave Field Synthesis setup.

Near the speaker array, it sounded as if different versions of Mr Braxton were zooming through space at superhuman speed, as a grinning Mr Testa dragged and dropped the “point sources” of the virtual Braxtons with the click of a mouse. After the session, Mr Testa noted that those effects had dovetailed nicely with some of Mr Braxton’s ideas, like the immersive sound environment of his Echo Echo Mirror House system, in which musicians sample vintage Braxton recordings while also navigating new scores, creating a vertiginous blur of past and present playing.

Mr Testa’s early experiments in the EMPAC studio sounded very little like the spatialized music of Ms Barrett. But it was an arresting miasma — one that raises the question of how much new insight into spatial audio may yet come from composers who are also virtuoso improvisers.

Like the ingenious musicality of Ms Barrett’s balloon experiments, insights about spatial sound may seem intuitive after the fact. But as organizers at EMPAC seem to understand, access to raw studio time and expert instruction has to come first.

Though I’m reviewing it in old-fashioned stereo, Yawar Fiesta is a 7.1 surround sound extravaganza. Chain DLK doesn’t currently have an entry for “Blu-ray Audio” as a known format, so I’ve had to pick “Laser Disc” as a cludge, but please be assured this is Blu-ray.

Unconfined by the duration limitations of vinyl or CD, this is a work just shy of 90 minutes dominated by operatic vocal snippets, long drones and hums, and waves of both distant and close percussive vocal noises that attack and decay in a way that’s leisurely at times, but never comfortable. Sourcing the majority of the sonic ingredients from the voice — with a particular favouring of masculine bass operatic tones and throat singing, but not without feminine and spoken word moments too — but without actually using a singer, brings us frequently into bizarre arrangements akin to choral arrangements gone wrong — at times quite Ligeti-like. Much of the time the elements are multi-layered, keeping everything hectic and relentless throughout. Electronic glitches, tape-style effects, pitch shifts and flangey panning (isn’t that a type of cake?) are thoroughly modern and digital and give the work an extra twist.

The work is ostensibly an opera — the press release describes a piece in multiple acts that’s a hybrid of actual storytelling and the name-dropping of broad themes into something that’s frankly very difficult to follow. But the result definitely has distinct scenes, and when holding your attention, is like listening to the most off-the-wall opera re-work you’ve ever heard.

After the bewildering 44-minute journey of Condor (La veillée), second track Taureau (Le défi) doesn’t perhaps represent enough of a shift. The addition of traffic noises and horns gives the sonics a different hint, as does the heavier use of discernible French language sources, but the core arrangement is essentially half an hour more of the same experimental opera.

Monologue final is also consistent rather than contrasting, but with fewer operatic elements and more emphasis on digital processing such as layering offset copies of the same sample at different speeds, and with sound effects akin to alien rocket launches and monstrous whispers tilting it more in the direction of sci-fi. The sound of rolling stock evokes the spirit of the KLF towards the very end.

It’s an unusual buffet, sometimes reminiscent of 60’s avantgarde choral works, sometimes the spacier sound of 90’s ambient house, sometimes very contemporary and sharp-sounding digital electronic frippery. It’s got a unique quality to it that demands attention, even though at 87 minutes long it perhaps can’t hold that attention throughout.