Surely it’s some sort of serendipitous combination of Canadian grant money and Splendid’s strong north-of-the-border label ties, but a dramatic preponderance of the most interesting experimental/electronic/noise-based work I’ve heard over my three-year tenure here has come from Montréal. Perhaps francophone Canadians, reacting to their province’s uneasy relationship with the rest of Canada, have converted discomfort into art. Perhaps it’s just something in the water. In any case, from the post-rock stylings of the Constellation roster to the very strangest soundscapes that issue from the empreintes DIGITALes folks, the work that comes out of this region is so intriguing as to make other areas’ artists seem deficient in both vision and their willingness to venture forth, assuming the audience will follow.
Still, that public funding thing alluded to above can’t be overemphasized. In this case, two talented young artists/documentarians set out on a several-month-long trek across a wide swath of Canada, recording anything that piqued their interest. The result is this stunning two-disc set of field recordings and manipulated aural scenes, each of which conveys both a sense of narrative and a sense of the multifaceted nature of a geographically huge nation’s life. While each is a coherent artistic statement on its own, the two together are so complementary that it’s hard to imagine the one without the other.
The first disc, “The Little Man In The Ear” (or, more mellifluously, Le Petit homme dans l’oreille), is the more manipulated-sounding of the two; the artists’ fingerprints are deliberately left all over certain sections, while others seem untouched from their original recordings. The prime example of the former comes during a visit to a carriage race: the announcer’s voice is sampled and manipulated as heavily as in any techno track, albeit sans the driving beat. As it swirls from one speaker to the other, the race’s sense of circular motion is recaptured and reimagined in the listener’s ear. It’s quite a trick, and a virtuoso production performance. At other points, sounds that had previously been presented in close to what I assume was their natural setting are subtly reintroduced in such a way as to give the listener both a sense of ongoing travel, and of the interconnectedness of things. For example, a track that begins with crickets chirping fades into people walking across gravel and eventually incorporates a barely-discernible conversation, then picks up each of the two previously added sounds once again, making you feel as if you’ve traveled some distance to visit with the speaking men, who have then graciously walked back with you to your point of origin.
The latter disc, “Surface Documents” [Documents de surface], is approached somewhat differently. While the first disc appears to have been designed to be played on a radio program, the second seems more like a collection of compelling sounds that didn’t quite fit into the theme of the first. Therefore, this disc acts more as a roving, narrative-free travelogue that glances over the entire map, chooses a theme, and then touches down everywhere that that theme might apply. For example, one of the longer sections intermixes the sounds of water interacting with various surfaces at various volumes, blending the sounds of waterways that may have been thousands of miles apart into a single beautiful piece.
If you can’t afford to take a few months and explore the backroads of Canada, I suggest that you take a couple of hours and let two people who clearly know their way around clue you in to the way life sounds in their country.
