Grâce au label québécois Empreintes Digitales, Solénoïde reprend le cap d’un monde électroacoustique complexe et parfois merveilleux dans lequel les enceintes font office d’instrument à part entière. Cet univers nous est dépeint cette fois-ci par une enseignante anglaise vivant en Norvège. À même pas 30 ans, cette jeune femme bardée de diplôme signe avec Isostasie son troisième album. Inutile de s’en cacher, sur ce disque Natasha Barrett construit des figures abstraites plutôt difficile d’accès. Pourtant, avec un peu d’attention et de concentration, quelques pépites soniques étincelantes sauront s’offrir à l’auditeur. Comme ébranlé par une énergie tellurique, ce dernier se perd dans les dédales bruitistes d’une œuvre au charme diffus. Certaines pièces possédant au passage un fort pourvoir d’évocation. Mais rien d’anormal à cela puisque Natasha compose en parallèle pour la danse et le théâtre. Qu’il s’agisse de paysages glaciaux ou post-industriels, de métaphores écologiques ou météorologiques, miss Barrett projette dans notre subconscient des images microclimatiques floues et troublantes. Adeptes de fictions sonores tout à la fois sombres et narratives, Isostasie vous est vivement recommandé.

Le bruitisme hardcore renferme en son sein un germe de facilité, comme en attestent les tonnes de productions maison qui cherchent à renchérir sur le style de Merzbow et des Haters. Heureusement que morceaux_de_machines nous ont livré le superbe liberum arbitrium. Bruitiste sans être extrême mais surtout éminemment intelligent, ce disque élève l’art de l’assaut sonore dans les hautes sphères grâce à de sévères retournements dynamiques et à une réserve inépuisable de sources sonores. Tout est à aimer: le contrôle des musiciens sur la brutalité de cette matière, la réalisation exquise, la pochette de Guy Boutin.

The empreintes DIGITALes label has over the years released lots of material by composers of so called “musique concrète” and “electroacoustic” music. For those unfamiliar with these genres, this sort of music originated almost half a century ago, when various “classical” composers started experimenting with the use and possibilities of studio-recording equipment for their compositions. Amongs these electronica pioneers were people like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Schaeffer. The result of this experimenting was that electronic equipment that was meant only for producing “classical” music became instruments themselves, and the artists could now produce music on the basis of samples and electronic equipment instead of using an entire orchestra. Thus a new genre was born. Later electronic music (like Kraftwerk) was made possible through these [r]evolutions.

Now, half a century later there are a lot of composers with “schooled” backgrounds that make their compositions with electronic equipment only. Over the years some famous composers, like Francis Dhomont and Denis Smalley, have had their works released on empreintes DIGITALes which has become a sort of archive for these compositions. Now a new generation of composers is releasing their work. Among these are Natasha Barrett (a former student of Denis Smalley) and Stephan Dunkelman.

The works of these composers are both very soundtrack-like in nature, highly processed sounds form almost natural flows, like an orchestra made out of samples slowly evolving towards its climax. Just like standard classical compositions these are very dense and highly emotional, ranging from very soft sounds, to huge walls of sound. These releases are quite similar in many respects, although Barrett’s work seems to be a bit more threatening and continuous, while Dunkelman’s seems to be more abstract and changing. For those more used to listening to ambient and electronica they can be very well compared to artists like Brume or Daniel Menche or perhaps even to a less abstract version of Illusion of Safety.

If you’re looking for music for your next salon gathering of MENSA members, you’ve found it in Rhizomes — music so highbrow that it’ll melt into your hairline. Despite its required accompaniment of burbles, bleeps, whistles and whines, it’s much more melodic than you might expect — as acousmatic music goes, anyway. Don’t be too surprised if the album and its creator end up becoming the focus of your conversation, rather than the background music for it.

If a George Lucas movie married a Claire Denis movie, this soundtrack would be the music for their Hitchcockish children. Metharcana sounds like its name, a children’s arcade experienced on meth, with a bunch of obscure references floating past your eyes. Sound bites of a woman whispering in French, fingers thrummed rapidly on a tight skin drum, coffee cups clanking against each other, video game noises… they’re all used to create an atmosphere of weird musical emptiness. The video game noises remind me of DJ Spooky tracks, but mostly this is the electronic type of experimentation you’d expect to find on a Schematic Records release. Rituellipses sounds like performance art — the kind of thing you’d hear while watching the Blue Man group do its thing. In fact, Dunkelman has composed for art exhibitions (Charlotte Marchal, sculptor; Axel Miret, painter), for art dance choreography (Michèle Noiret) and for fashion design (Azniv Afsar) — all of these artists, of course, members of the avant garde.

The sounds in Rituellipses could be billiard balls knocking against one another on a hard surface. You’ll wonder what the ritual is, and if the ellipse is part of the ritual or if it is the ritual, and then — if you’re like me — you’ll get a headache and sit down fast in case you get dizzy. While certain loops in this piece seem to have been repeated from an earlier movement, all of the musical ideas are pushing forward in a linear fashion; older themes are abandoned, newer ones taken up and pushed to their conclusion. As many electronic compositions of this variety focus on the idea of layering, this is a really interesting change of the format on Dunkelman’s part. And he always lives up to his name; these compositions are really dark, even when he’s experimenting with brighter tones, like a bouncing basketball and athletic shoes scraping on a gymnasium floor.

Whenever you listen to Dunkelman, you’re going to have to think hard — he’s a workout for the mind, as strenuous as solid house music is a workout for your hips. Rhizomes is definitely going to plant seeds of thought.

This is a CD of musical compositions for acoustic guitar and magnetic tape. In 1997 Parra commissioned four electroacoustic performers to create compositions for him. These artists are Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau and Stéphane Roy. Parra took these compositions as a basis for a mixed work by adding his own acoustic guitar parts. These make for international collaboration between the four Canadian artists and the Colombian Parra. A fifth piece is done along the same principles between Parra and a fellow-Colombian composer Mauricio Bejarano. In a style similar to Michael Hedges, Parra performs unexpected acoustic acrobatics on a normal (unprepared) instrument and adds some vocalizations. His additions never overcrowd the work. (4.5/5)