[…] a selection of tracks played at The Wire HQ during the making of our July 2018 issue […] Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, Nano-Cosmos […]

Composed across a period of more than five years, Nano-Cosmos is a five-piece cycle of acousmatic pieces dedicated to insects, small arthropods and microorganisms. Fifty-three minutes of arhythmic granular clicks, glitches and sharp biology lab sounds running over long drones, tuned synthetic hums, irregular heartbeat sounds and electric growls, it certainly emphasises how alien the microscopic world is relative to what we would call familiar.

If you’re squeamish, don’t worry — despite being rooted in biology, sonically there’s quite a digital flavour to it, often sounding more sci-fi than organic, particularly in pieces like Bacillus Chorus or the expansive synth opening of Pixel Springtail Promenade. The biological aspect exhibits itself as much in the unpredictability as in the tones themselves.

Pixel Springtail Promenade is a notable highlight, a self-contained 15-minute work in many sections where the synthetic pads evolve into larger more orchestral sounds with a luxuriant quality that emphasises the dichotomy of the insect clicking noises — twisting into weirdness towards the end with a soundscape that to my ear sounds decidedly more like a frog chorus than insects.

Final piece Xylocopa Ransbecka is also an opus, accompanied by the hard-to-beat conceptual description: “features a carpenter bee and twenty doors, recorded in Belgium”. After a series of disorientating vignette-style sections, again more orchestral elements appear in the second half, building steadily to an almost conventional crescendo that then devolves into a digital equivalent where the insectoid clicking and glitching multiples exponentially until we approach white noise. It’s a fitting finale, both successful and strange.

Inspired by and sourced from a selection of very specific biological phenomena, this release really does seem to blur the lines between music and science — and the result is a nicely immersive bit of complex soundscaping that you really can get into.

Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’un artiste nous plonge dans les profondeurs de l’infiniment petit, mais ce que réussit à réaliser l’artiste installée à Montréal, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek est une prouesse sonore qui se doit d’être saluée.

Construit ou inspiré par les sons émis de divers insectes et micro-organismes, Nano-Cosmos est un concentré de field recordings et de triturations auditives, trouvant leurs sources à travers ce que nous côtoyons, sans pour autant prendre conscience de leur existence.

Qu’ils soient bactéries, grillons, acariens, abeilles ou collemboles, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek construit 5 titres autour de tous ces organismes vivants, mettant à la lumière une histoire qui leur est propre, regard du monde de l’invisible et de l’inaudible.

Cette œuvre acousmatique resitue deux univers qui se touchent et cohabitent, superposant bruits naturalistes et recherche sophistiquée, électroacoustique et sensations issues de notre environnement quotidien, faisant surgir un conte abstrait à la volupté micro-labyrinthique. Envoûtant.

This ear-tickling electroacoustic beauty comes from Montréal’s Ana Dall’Ara-Majek. Born in Paris, she’s a composer and sound artist who earned her PhD in composition at the Université de Montréal in 2016.

Dall’Ara-Majek describes Nano-Cosmos as “a cycle of acousmatic pieces dedicated to insects, small arthropods and micro-organisms.” It’s not difficult to imagine that if our hearing was strong enough to listen to the various bugs and other small organisms around us, the world would sound very much like these extraordinary five pieces.

The work is not all clicks and beeps though. Pixel Springtail Promenade (2014-15) for example incorporates field recordings of voices and public spaces that deliver welcome contrast. As much as this is an album of fascinating, beautifully produced sounds, it is a demonstration of Dall’Ara-Majek’s extraordinary compositional style.

Electroacoustic music is most powerful when it’s in the hands of an imaginative producer. It’s one thing to bring together a palette of interesting sounds. It’s another thing to piece them together in a manner that draws out thought-provoking contrasts and surprising connections. Nano-Cosmos has plenty of all this.

At just 38, Dall’Ara-Majek has already earned herself an international reputation. Her music has been featured at a long list of European and North American festivals that includes Sound in Space, Multiphonies, L’Espace du son, Sincrónic, Sound Travels, Akousma, Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and Elektro Arts.

And she’s a sought-after collaborator. Ida Toninato is a regular partner in their duo Jane/KIN. She’s worked on a variety of theatre, dance and film projects and has composed for a host of chamber music ensembles.

This new recording is the product of an accomplished artist in her prime.

Electroacoustic storyteller Paul Dolden has long been interested in the intersections of music and mythology, coding his theories on the sounds of ancient cultures as densely textured metaphors, from 1990’s Below the Walls of Jericho to today’s Music Of Another Present Era. In Histoires d’histoire, he feeds us his intoxicating blend of memory, musical scales and imagination as a pan-global soup of backwards gongs, scattergun samba flurries and hyper-real ensembles whirling on a carousel of mythical time; martial percussion rattling off in Janek Schaeffer nostalgium; microtonal musics of diffuse cultures united by their complexity, faux-improvisational verve and shamanic ecstasy.

The outlier (of sorts) is the jam sesh in BeBop Baghdad where some righteous six-string noodling competes for breathing space with a molten brass band. I wonder if this is what Derek Bailey dreamed of after jamming with Buckethead at Company ‘91? A striking and visceral listening experience throughout, but aesthetically and socially a perfect fit for the Empreintes DIGITALes label, which is a stable of mostly Francophone electroacousticians who’ve been showered with awards for outstanding achievements in the field of electronic excellence… if you’ve not stopped by, then here’s your chance!