It’s been a while since I’ve contributed to my on again/off again examination of the wonderful empreintes DIGITALes label. I’m going to dig deep into their catalog and talk about this stellar release from 2008. Ned Bouhalassa’s Gratte-cité is one of those releases that evokes, not only a long passage of time but also a vast soundscape, creating an unparalleled cinéma pour l’oreille. This sense of “the epic” is familiar to me because there are other releases on empreintes DIGITALes that deliver in the same way. I’m thinking specifically of the Gilles Gobeil / René Lussier release Le contrat and Arturo Parra’s Parr(A)cousmatique which I’ve also written about. It’s this boundless, infinitely expansive journey through environments both physical and metaphysical, rooted in both real time and a temporal otherworld that elevates Gratte-cité to such a compelling listen.

Full disclosure: When I first heard this, I was less than enamored… and I know why. The beats.

Full disclosure (addendum): Now… when I listen, I’m completely enamored… and I know why. The beats.

Bouhalassa has done something that I’m sure has been done before but… not in such a seamless, organic way. He married both live and electronic drum n’ bass elements to the Acousmatic world. And this marriage wins the “Power Couple” award usurping Brad and Angelina!

I’ll return to the beats in a bit but a little about Bouhalassa first. It appears that he has his feet in two worlds, not only working in the Acousmatic space but also creating music for film, television, and video. I’ve looked around and it seems his Acousmatic work is limited to this release and 1998’s Aérosol (also on empreintes DIGITALes). A quick search on YouTube reveals several short videos ranging from synth demos to short films and documentaries in which he created the soundtrack. Much of this newer music has a retro “synthwave” vibe to it, a vibe that also pokes its head out on Gratte-cité and not in a small way. (BTW, since I mentioned “synthwave”, the fact that there is even an element of it on this release really adds to its appeal when it’s mixed into the final mélange.)

Unfortunately, I can’t link you to any of the works on this album in their entirety but, like all empreintes DIGITALes releases, you can sample a healthy segment of each piece on their dedicated webpage. But, to really experience this album… a single listen straight through is the way to go. It’s long, about 76 minutes but, most good journeys are.

Gratte-cité (Cityscraper) can be looked at as the Acousmatic world’s version of a David Lean movie… it’s that big! Bouhalassa says:

In preparing the sonic materials for these pieces, I selected, like a DJ, what I liked out of my large collection of recordings, though in my case, these are recordings of city soundscapes. I then imagined a fantasy, where a gigantic vinyl record’s grooves are replaced by the jagged outline of skyscrapers, and I, a giant, drop an impossibly-large needle and begin to ‘play’ the city.

The first piece, The Lighthouse kicks things off in an ominous fashion. Horse hooves on cobblestone streets, old-timey music, faint human presence, and movement of sound to and fro from within the headspace all mingle with an unsettling drone. It all comes together to form a darkened city street, a place in the old world perhaps. The movement, the sound gestures all point claustrophobically inward… until they don’t! Enter the electronic beats… and enter they do in a grand, chest-thumping peacock strut that made me smile.

I remember on my first listen to this album not too long ago I didn’t smile. I was so taken aback by this overt display of “techno dance music” that so rudely interrupted my perfect symbiosis of loudspeaker / brain-infused dreaming I may have audibly uttered, “What is this shit”. But, as my full disclosure above intimates… I now have arrived at the realization of how bloody brilliant this move was. These rhythm blasts, both electronic and human-made (courtesy of Christian Olsen) are surgically dropped in at strategic places for what seems like the sole purpose to disrupt.

Disrupt? Yes, but disrupt what. Surely the answer to that will have as many different responses as there are listeners. One thing for sure though, these events create drama… and drama in Acousmatic music is or should be a prime goal.

The beats, which I now consider so important to this album are scattered across its entirety. They appear, they disrupt, they vanish… never wearing out their welcome, and they are beautiful!

The centerpiece of this album is the 34-minute Urban Cuts, a crazy patchwork of places, times, visions, and emotions. This is the piece that best demonstrates what he means by “playing the city”.

Bouhalassa “plays” three cities, Montréal, Las Vegas, and Berlin. The piece has no natural separation between places, but the listener can determine the change of locale by the natural, organic vibe change from what preceded it. Montréal and Berlin both display their urban plumage, moving from frenetic to serene, dark to light in a blink of an eye. It’s the Las Vegas middle section though that is the most compelling for me.

Bouhalassa achieves an extremely accurate sonic representation of the mystical solitude of desert life in stark contrast to the hedonistic frenzy of a casino. That being said, it’s possible for the listener to be transported to any number of places depending on… the listener. In the middle of this lengthy segment, the poet Fortner Anderson infuses the soundscape with lines from his poem, Vegas. His delivery is cold, with a sense of pathos, tension, and dread… doing an excellent job augmenting the already vivid pictures in this sonic epic.

This piece, as in all the others has the beats as well as a “just under the surface” bed of long tone, shifting, electronic, and futuristic synthwave layers. The addition of well-placed cello (by Delphine Measroch) is a nice touch as well. If Vangelis didn’t do such a great job with the soundtrack to Blade Runner, Urban Cuts would be a very able substitute.

The 16-minute mOrpheus also begins in a very 80’s synthwave fashion but eventually dissolves into a lonely, deserted sound world with some sparse, sustained Piano chords. The ear traveler is then ported over to a robotic, Kraftwerk-ish place for further examinations by whatever manner of nefarious beings who created this cold, sterile place. Outside there is panic and chaos but here, in this place… there is nothing but the warm, secure feeling of skin against the stainless-steel table on which you lie on. This piece has less of the organic natural world, with the synthetic sucking up all the atmosphere. Of course, your mileage will vary based on your own David Lean epic.

Unlike mOrpheus, Impulse, at 14 minutes begins with, what I consider… classic Acousmatic sound. This would fit well in the Francis Dhomont, Beatriz Ferreyra, or Denis Dufour zone. Sounds moving through space leaving the mind just enough time to get a fix on them before they are gone. More beats of the drum ’n’ bass variety eventually do kick in but don’t last long… giving way to all sorts of non-rhythmic, synthetic as well as organic atmospheres. With this in mind, Impulse may be the most evocative piece on the album, leaving the mind free to spin whatever image(s) it can generate.

The final piece, Songe errant is the shortest, at just under 6 minutes. Beats and synths cavort in a synthetic playground until night falls and the natural sound of “the world” takes over, and all is well.

The empreintes DIGITALes label has an extremely deep roster of great releases and I hope to be a bit more consistent in my coverage moving forward. Bouhalassa’s Gratte-cité is a very worthy addition to a long lineage of unique, adventurous sound explorers and comes VERY highly recommended. I should mention that you can grab a high-res download off the electrocd site. It was this format that I based this write-up on. Additionally, the physical product is available as a DVD-Audio with advanced resolution and 5.1 surround sound. I have this and, do I even need to say how incredible it sounds? This is a great release from the label’s back catalog!

Ned Bouhalassa, for some reason, is such a familiar name to me that I instantly was sure that I had reviewed his work before within the framework of empreintes DIGITALes, but I hadn’t! After some bewildered thinking I found that he’d been a frequent participant at the CEC mailinglist, and that was the solution to my sudden problem. Bouhalassa introduces his DVD-Audio in such a graphic and catchy way that I might as well quote him here:

“The title of this disc translates to ‘cityscraper’ In preparing the sonic materials for these pieces, I selected, like a DJ, what I liked out of my large collection of recordings, though in my case, these are recordings of city soundscapes. I then imagined a fantasy, where a gigantic vinyl record’s grooves are replaced by the jagged outline of skyscrapers, and I, a giant, drop an impossibly-large needle and begin to ‘play’ the city.”

Track 1. The Lighthouse (2005) [6:41]

This work isn’t solely a sound work in its own right, but was composed for a video by Khrystell E Burlin; The Lighthouse; the third part of the triptych Theseus. Bouhalassa opens up his cloud of ingredients; motioning towards “loops of filtered noise, synthesizer textures, urban samples, horse hoof rhythms, creaking doors, a bell, drum and bass sounds, break beats, crackling smack downs, radio whispers from an old war” and more.

The music commences on that double vision view; a jangling of hinges (perhaps a merchant opening up onto the street in Lahore) and a symphonic low-key string section from Tchaikovsky’s late 1800s, right before a contaminated glass of water in St Petersburg.

After a little while the two worlds are indistinguishable, as the soughing of the distant engines of the city take on their own collective symphonic traits; the factory siren appearing in the brass section. Gray voices without words leaking out of the central station move like bubbles on water deep inside the city’s consciousness, moving the matter-of-factly weights of internal meaning. The clicketycklicking horseshoes across cobbled streets remind me — because of the electroacoustic environment — of Alain Savouret’s Don Quixotte Corporation (1980 — 81).

Insectlike beats wheeze out of the background sonic pollution like cockroaches out of cracks in Dallas kitchens, soon becoming so obtrusively mechanic that the insects, if indeed they retain their guises, must be a case of robot entomology.

A grinding machine may as well be an old style fuzz box guitar in Bristol, UK, and the munching beats the repercussions of a boat engine hid deep beneath the hull on a vessel out on the Avon.

At times the soundscape solidifies into crystalline worlds of sharp angles, and yet other times reality gets a grip as familiar street scenes condensate on the window of the mind, only to dissipate in the passing of time units.

Mostly, though, it’s a maze of dreams you journey through Ned Bouhalassa’s opening work on this phonogram. I can even hear and feel the swinging on a swing; that fluctuation in gravity and that smooth air rushing back round your face…

Tracks 2 — 6. Urban Cuts (2005) [34:06]: Montréal 1 / Montréal 2 / Las Vegas / Berlin 1 / Berlin 2

Fortner Anderson [texts] Delphine Measroch [cello] Christian Olsen [drums]

Life seems so incredibly natural and self-evident in these cuts, although it is so brittle and elusive in its many temporal identities, as we shall se as we change bodies at the end of the turnstile. Nutritional processes well forth in Bouhalassa’s Urban Cuts, unstoppable even by death, which really isn’t any clear line at all, since processes keep working matter long after that over-dramatized change. Life is a carnival and death too; a meaty, smacking, bulging meat feast, fucking and farting, Rabelaisian, as is this music, which works right inside these natural processes, these exchanges of nutrients and wastes; wastes that become nutrients, noises that become sounds that become music that become mathematic and philosophy and high ends in themselves!

Ingredients from human and other terrestrial life fly up and flutter around like flakes of soot in Ned Bouhalassa’s Urban Cuts, too many examples to really mention, except that the stitching together of these expressions of energy excites you as a listener. It is easy to do these kinds of mosaics these days, when you don’t have to cut and splice like Stockhausen in Kontakte — so the creative process is, in a funny way, wrung over to the listener and his perceptive intelligence. Out of Urban Cuts the experienced listener may construct many a situation, different on each run-through.

The composer explains that he’s mixed sounds from three great cities; Montréal, Las Vegas and Berlin, and also that he cooperated with live musicians herein; Delphine Measroch on cello and Christian Olsen on drums.

At times the haphazard feeling of randomness gives way to seemingly more constructed stretches of audio, and even long, bending drones, in which the spoken parts emerge, either as a murmur bubbling in the distance, like a mirage along a desert highway, or right up your face, close; the rancid breath of the words gushing up your nostrils, bouncing off the corrugated iron of Rio de Janeiro hillside slums, here and there in fascist drum beats setting the pace of an obsessive march through your mysteriously migrating mind.

I like it when the talk touches on Harry Partch and Barstow! I like it when Bouhalassa sounds like Mike Daily in Alarm!

Tracks 7 — 10. mOrpheus (2003) [15:42]: Orpheus’ First Dream / Orpheus Wakes Up / The Train Station / Alexanderplatz

Ned Bouhalassa explains that this piece is “a loose interpretation” of the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice, involving a motion from rural Quebec to Berlin, swirling through the cityscape of the German city.

The music commences on such a gradual level that you begin to check if the amplifier really is on, but slowly an ambience grows on you, like a slow Saturday morning awakening after a hard workweek. The environment you find yourself in is a mixture of the natural and the synthetic, like it often is in Bouhalassa’s sound world. The composer lets on that he’s used sonic ingredients from the farm of his friend Michael Smith. Out of this soaring, glaring coat of mind rise more definite, contoured sonic objects, sounding like piano tones flying through an atmosphere that makes them sway and wobble. Percussive events mix in, although painted in a heavy coat of ambience, and after a while a rock n’ roll tour de force moves like a fist inside a leather glove, in semi-darkness.

The atmosphere thins out, placing you at four o clock in the morning on a lawn in a Berlin park, your pants wet from the dew. History is sleeping, and your heart picks up a heavy rhythm — or is it the trembling vitality of your mind shaking you up, when nothing else is very obvious around you?

A grated scent of a pop melody struts softly through your memory, but always at arm length’s distance, never getting any closer, and then… “Einstegien bitte!” — a crude female voice talking at you from out of the German orderliness, and a train picks up speed, while the female rigor is sucked up in the composer’s sound-poetic permutation, reaching it’s individual Einheit, which dances up through the escape shaft of your mind. Language and dreams, Eisenbahn und Träume!

Through an atmosphere of echoing tunnel steps of a city and a gray mist of anonymities a Kraftwerk rhythm taps its fingers absentmindedly against the table top of the present, while your legs stretch far out of reach, entangled in a future that isn’t yet determined.

Track 11. Impulse (1999) [13:59]

Ned Bouhalassa defines this work as rather indefinable; as “spaces that are not clearly comfortable or unpleasant” — a Bardo journey, then, it seems, in which reflections of one’s own mind builds the scenery. “The doors and resonating hallways push us to the edges of our imagination”. Bouhalassa explains that he’s made field recordings in the basement of the National Film Board in Montréal, using them as “a kind of narrative”.

Indeed, the piece starts up like a car engine, with a car engine! It doesn’t take long, though, before a sense of unreality, or dreamscape, takes over — and as in many other works of the composer, the mix of reality and synthesizing of that reality swirls the listener with almost brute force and suddenness. Behind a bland pop beat an echo of the mysteriously unknown keeps your ears towards the unexpected open, and before you know it — like driving a car into a bank of fog — everything has changed, and you start to wonder who you are…

Track 12. Songe errant (2005) [5:50]

This is presented as a bagatelle, a minuscule, passing daydream: “A postcard to trigger some memories” A door on screechy hinges opens the piece with historical homages. Water flushes down a kitchen sink, and a hardly visible (audible) distant character inside the ambience grows on you like a fever, slowly encompassing the whole sounding space like a hovering swarm of bees. Distant reflections of sound from a reality that once was yours leaks into the bee swarm in a muffled amnesia. The situation is unclear, as if you’re coming to in a hospital bed after anesthesia, or like gaining new consciousness again and again, as you are reborn, over and over. Glary reflections of repetitious Renaissance atmospheres shift centuries into the circling present, which takes you in its determined hands and holds you up to yourself to watch, closely — as all symbols of force and might fall away from you, outwards, in a gesture of God’s open hand — which is summer —, while a female voice out of the mist of the mind sounds like an Irish folk song whisper, though it really is a recording of instructions blaring out of an airport speaker, talking about unaccompanied baggage. Brian Eno-type musical figures carry you in a meditative mood down the duration of whatever situation you’re in, as the truth of impermanence becomes ever more evident. All times are now, all places here — and Ned Bouhalassa’s Songe errant makes you feel like life is just a memory; that you remember your life, minute by minute — and that this remembrance IS life…

Depuis plus de vingt ans le montréalais Ned Bouhalassa occupe le terrain du monde de la musique électroacoustique. Cela ne l’empêche pas d’être également connu dans le cinéma et la télévision pour qui il écrit beaucoup. Cependant, son parcours discographique est assez mince. De lui on connait l’album Aérosol sorti en 1998 sur empreintes DIGITALes et quelques apparitions sur diverses compilations. Autant dire qu’un disque de Bouhalassa est une chose rare et qu’il est plus que souhaitable de ne pas passer à côté si on s’intéresse un tant soit peu aux musiques électroacoustiques. Comme beaucoup de ses camarades, Bouhalassa a une attirance certaine pour les ensembles urbains qui, pour lui, est une émanation vivante qui trouve sa signification dans l’évocation des reliefs des gratte-ciels nord-américains ou européens. Pour ce faire, et il le dit lui-même, il agit comme un DJ, puisant dans un vivier sonore qui va de l’enregistrement environnemental à une orchestration qui fait justement référence à l’urbain. Ainsi Ned Bouhalassa s’installe au cœur de la cité mais, en même temps, il la surplombe, l’observe et la fantasme comme une histoire moderne faite de rebondissements et labyrinthique.

Gratte-cité est un disque qui attise la curiosité car à la différence de beaucoup d’albums de musique électroacoustique, celui-ci sort des sentiers battus. En effet, il adopte sciemment des formes plus mélodiques et nettement moins abstraites. Gratte-cité est comme une déambulation. On traverse les grandes avenues mais on n’hésite pas non plus à pénétrer les recoins les plus sombres. De Montréal à Berlin, Ned Bouhalassa s’écarte des images d’Epinal et donne sa version de la vie urbaine. Une version qui est à mi-chemin entre l’utilisation de l’environnement et les musiques issues de la rue. Le Canadien touche souvent juste en créant une musique qui ne suit que ses propres règles. Gratte-cité est donc bien le relais d’une musique de son temps, un instantané qui ouvre un long champ de vision sur les villes occidentales. Une façon comme une autre de les vivre, de les appréhender, de s’en imprégner.

I finally finished listening to this album last night (couldn’t write about it then); I had started three weeks ago. Why so long? Well, it’s a 5.1 DVD-Audio – and by Ned Bouhalassa, something too rare to take it in casually. So I waited for optimal listening conditions. And it was worth the wait! Bouhalassa may be releasing music on empreintes DIGITALes, but his music is outside the box of academic electroacoustics. His techno background still rears its head in his artistic process and style. As a result, his music is surprising and entertaining, but also deep, image-filled and ear-intriguing. Breakbeat episodes cut through moments of pure sonic plasticit and, vivid and eminently urban field recordings. The editing is jumpy and frantic. The Urban Cuts suite (featuring cello and drumkit parts) is a must-hear. Strongly recommended to electroacoustics fans and newcomers alike.

Translated from French.

Mit der wahnwitzigen Vorstellung des eigenen Ichs als Tonabnehmer, der über die Oberfläche einer Großstadt kratzt, endet das Vorwort des Kanadiers zu seinem zweiten Album. Umgesetzt wird die vielversprechende Idee mit kollagiertem Basismaterial aus u.a. Montreal, Las Vegas oder Berlin. Eigenwillige Snapshots verweben sich oder werden gar von krachenden Beats in andere Städte gebeamt. Schlichtweg-Mix hieße das wohl unter DJs, hier geht es aber natürlich nicht um grenzenloses Tanzen, das Gegenteil ist der Fall: im Moment liegt die Schönheit, vielleicht auch in der Zeitspanne, aber dieses Wissen wird seit Jahrzehnten bereits immer unsicherer. Daher muß der Moment endlich überwiegen und, wie ich meine, verfügt kein anderes Mittel als eben die Collage über mehr Kraft, den verflüchtigten, nie und nimmer dagewesenen Punkt hervorzuheben und im Vergessen zu speichern. Nein, Bouhallassa schneidet nicht wahl- und planlos, noch immer liefern Mythen, Träume und Tradition den nötigen Halt im blanken Dickicht und verdichten letztlich die Audio-Schnipsel zu offenen Erzählungen höchster Güte.

Wie ein Riese ließ Ned Bouhalassa eine imponierend große Nadel, die eines Plattenspielers nämlich, vom Wolkenkratzer herunter fallen und „spielte“ wie ein DJ die Stadt. Ned Bouhalassa, ein Komponist aus Montréal, begleitet auf seiner zweiten Solo-DVD den Sound der Straßen, Hochhäuser, Brücken usw. Bei mOrpheus treibt es die dunklen Klangfelder von Québec nach Berlin, bis zum Zoo und zum Alexanderplatz. „Berlin ist ein gigantischer Bahnhof,“ urteilt Bouhalassa. Folglich nutzt er die Geräusche dieses Molochs und fügte sie in sein elektro-akustisches Gebilde ein: Zugfahrgeräusche, U-Bahn-Ansagen. Türen quietschen wie im Horrorthriller, und oft wirken die Soundscapes von Bouhalassa wie Musik zu Hörspielen. Wie stark er in den „natürlichen“ Sound eingreift und ihn manipuliert, bleibt wegen der differenziert „getürkten“ Klänge im Dunkeln.

Empreintes Digitales presents new works by Ned Bouhalassa, a new generation Canadian electroacoustic composer presenting gutsy and urban electroacoustic music. Definitely a leap forward!!

This prestigious Canadian label is renowned for its high quality sound releases. 95% of its artists have a degree in composition and lecture at some place in the world. The sound quality of the releases are sublime, 24-bit recording and mastering. The best you can get. Still, in the past few years I somehow had heard enough. It was all too shiny and also the software used by the composers and their semantics became somewhat too similar. There was a rather clear cut “Empreintes Digitales” sound. This release stands out from the crowd.

Bouhalassa, in the liner notes, writes that he imagines himself a giant who plays the city with a record player needle. The composer has an impressive career in scoring for film music as well, which helps to improve underscoring real life sounds and images, of course.

Bouhalassa makes a connection to contemporary city life and so takes the music out of the state of the art high tech studio. The center piece of the disc is the 34 minutes Urban Cuts featuring the work of poet Fortner Anderson and electronics added with cello (Delphine Measroch) and drums (Christian Olsen). The feel of this work is definitely ’urban’. It’s a journey (the poem tells about it) but not in the ’conventional’ acousmatic style. No, there are parts where the drums really work a groove, together with the basses that we know from the drum ’n’ bass area. These are alternated with the recitation by Anderson (himself) accompanied by field recordings and electronics. A true adventure for the listener with a firm musical background in modern dance music (like my kids, who enjoyed this a lot as well).

The other tracks on this disc, though as lengthy as ’urban cuts’ also breathe the outdoor, city atmosphere. Field recordings of the Berlin underground at some point grow out to become massive sound walls. Bouhalassa uses slamming doors as turning points in one of the other works, Impulse. It starts with the sound of a car driving away (immediate reference to Kraftwerk) and later doors are on several occasions breaks to a new soundscape. The city is almost always somehow the general background.

This is a very strong collection of works. May be so Bouhalassa regarded himself a DJ, selecting what he likes from his large collection of recordings. His choices are well made, and I hope Empreintes Digitales will allow more of such adventurous composers to release their work.

Rated: 9/10

The Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes offers a couple of new releases from award-winning electroacoustic composers, both pressed up as DVDs to offer the listener the choice of stereo or 5.1 surround-sound listening. [Montréal-based] French composer Ned Bouhalassa arranges cut-ups from his huge collection of field recordings on Gratte-cité (IMED 0895), and thereby fancies that he is ‘playing’ entire cities the same way a DJ plays old vinyls dug from his crates. This conceit is reflected in the cover art, where an old-fashioned tonearm is poised menacingly above an imaginary collaged urban-scape and rendered with harsh colours and process dots, like the cover to some non-existent dystopian sci-fi novel.

David Berezan was born and educated in Canada, but studied with Jonty Harrison in Birmingham and is now an established electroacoustic Director at Manchester University. La face cachée (IMED 0896) refers to aspects of his semi-mystical working method, whereby he hopes to reveal “hidden spaces” through his tape-assemblage, thus arriving at the profound revelations of self-discovery.

The DVDs released by Empreintes Digitales don’t contain images, but highly quality music, to be selected as stereo or 5.1 surround sound. In the past I complained about the lack of difference between the various releases on this label, with some exceptions, but the release by Ned Bouhalassa is something different. Bouhalassa has a background as a composer for films and TV series and is from Montréal. He doesn’t seem to belong the academic world that usually inhabits Empreintes Digitales. He works much more like the others around with loops of sounds, more regular synthesizers but every now and then also throws in some breakbeat rhythm. At the same time he uses field recordings (street sounds, natural sounds) and the length of the pieces is not entirely pop song either. The combination of all of this makes this quite a surprising [disc], a great one for this label. Modern electronics without the pretensions, the same idiom and such like. Nice one indeed.