For those ot you unfamiliar with the genre, Claude Schryer composes electroacoustic and environmental music focusing on the spiritual, artistic, and social aspects of sound. If you accept the definition ot music as sound events in time and space, then Claude Schryer is the maestro. Armed with his tape recorder he roams the world capturing the sonic essence ot each location. Then back in his studio Claude assembles these tapes to create some unusual and tascinating sonic environments. Autour contains three such compositions (Musique de l’Odyssée sonore, El medio ambiente acústico de México, and Vancouver Soundscape Revisited) plus a fourth composition (Autour d’une Musique portuaire) recorded live on 3 March 1996 in Montréal. Musique de l’Odyssée sonore is a sonic portrait of Quebec in seven parts incorporating sounds ot water, insects, trains, horse and cart, church bells, car horns, seagulls, Native American chanting, etc. El medio ambiente acústico de México is a six-part soundscape incorporating similar elements as well as a Mexican shepherd and a man selling Chiclets in a Mexico City subway. Vancouver Soundscape Revisited is a seven part impressionistic portrait of the musicality and poetry of past, present, and future soundscapes of Vancouver. Claude uses hundreds of sounds in these three compositions to create his environments. The sound is crystal clear and the movements flow seamlessly as if you are strolling through them. The final composition, Autour d’une musique portuaire, is an environmental composition for six boats frozen in the port of Montréal, two trains in motion, and the bells of the Notre-Dame Basilica all conducted by Claude Schryer via walkie-talkies. This is truly a three-dimensional expenence that is difficult to capture in stereo. You can feel the boat and train horns as they reverberate, yet to be in the middle of it must have been quite an experience! Autour is music for the adventurous listener. Be brave, take a chance, and explore the world of electroacoustic soundscapes.