Noise is available in a wide range of noisinesses, from the subliminal ebb of ambient to the cacophonous roar of industrial noise, but one of its stranger manifestations is electroacoustic music, a form that appears, as best I can discern, to be the near-exclusive province of the Québec experimental label empreintes DIGITALes [produced by DIFFUSION i MéDIA]. The simplest generalization for this style, summarized on the first disc of the Sombient compilation A Storm of Drones, is that it is a lot like ambient, only not relaxing. If you imagine that Brian Eno’s Music for Airports is not a single album, but rather a compilation of isolated peaceful moments from other sources, like an abstract instrumental version of those Enya-heavy Pure Moods collections sold on late-night television, then electroacoustic could be the less-peaceful source material that got left out.

Most of Jonty Harrison’s Articles indéfinis sounds like the exasperated monologous rant of an R2D2 the size of a killer whale. Noises come in clusters, sudden and decisive, whipping through the stereo field and the human audio spectrum on impatient errands to somewhere else entirely. If stars were actually living creatures, existing simultaneously on time scales both faster and slower than our own, arguing with each other on topics beyond human comprehension, much less grammar, then this is what Fiorella Terenzi’s would hear in her radio telescopes.

Academic electronic music can be so cold at times, so calculated and intellectualized, so academic! The pleasure of Tangram is that the music it contains is so human. Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that Robert Normandeau creates his music entirely from acoustic samples (often human voices), thereby giving his music an innate organicism. Another reason is that each piece on Tangram is aurally cinematic in the sense that each tells a story — which is refreshingly human in a century like ours where the trend in ‘serious’ music has been decidedly anti-programmatic. Finally, there is Normandeau’s recording technique, which aims to recreate a live-concert-type atmosphere. Rather than mix his works electronically, he ‘mixes’ them acoustically by routing each track to a speaker and spacing the speakers in different configurations in the studio. Thus each ‘mix’ is actually a distinct capturing of the sonic diffusion created by a given speaker setup. If you want to hear what this adds up to, Tangram has two ‘mixes’ of each piece so that you can compare and contrast. Mr. Normandeau is to be applauded for creating such inviting and sensitive electronic music.

All too rarely do recordings appear which present a convincing argument for the value of acousmatic music, but this CD from Stéphane Roy does just that, and with no shortage of eloquence. This is acousmatic art in its purest, highest form. There is a fluidity and mobility in the control and shaping of material which reveals a truly sculptural approach to sound — sound as a plastic medium. One immediately notices the careful attention to detail in this music, yet it is never over-controlled. There is always a sense of real joy, of reveling in the beauty of the sounds for their own sake. This is music which is immediately attractive on first hearing (perhaps because of the strong pitch content), but also promises that closer listening will yield yet greater rewards. What comes over very strongly in all the pieces featured is that the composer is not simply manipulating material as if it were inanimate matter. Instead, the sounds really are made to live and breathe, as if they themselves possess an intelligence, and exhibit particular behaviors in direct response to their sonic environment.

All the pieces on this CD share common stylistic attributes, in particular a characteristic use of the re-enveloping of sounds, both in intensity and in pitch. The earlier works Ondes / Arborescences and Paysages intérieurs share a vitality which at times can be overwhelming, but at the same time is always clearly under control, while Mimetismo achieves with apparent effortlessness the difficult task of carrying such a strongly acousmatic language over into the live instrumental domain, and in such a way that guitar and tape really do act as one (something often claimed for other pieces, but rarely with real justification).

An important point is that these works exhibit not just artistry, but craftsmanship too, something indispensable in the acousmatic domain, since the composer not only conceives the music, but also makes it. In the final piece, Crystal Music, this craftsmanship is taken to new heights, with its exquisitely controlled explorations of quiet but intensely active shards of sound. In effect, the sense of craft becomes itself part of the artistic experience. We need more such music.

In Forêt profonde, we may be better able to relate to the central proposition — we have all been children at least, even if this is only one of the many levels on which the piece operates. Dhomont’s evocation of childhood through fairy tales is potent — dangerous, even — to our urbanised sensibilities. What is staggering about this work, as with so much Dhomont, is the sheer accuracy of the observation — he might be talking about me, my life, my singular experience; the insight cuts the listener like a knife. The piece exhibits a masterly and poignant interweaving of the sounds of childhood (actual? remembered?), an adult’s awareness of the ‘real’ subject matter of fairy tales and documentary references to the life of Bettelheim, who survived Dachau but committed suicide in 1990.

Those who know other works by Francis Dhomont will recognise some fingerprints: the exquisite sound world; the beautifully executed recordings of real-world sounds; the apparent simplicity, yet complete appropriateness to the poetic intent, of the studio transformations (particularly, in these two works, of the voice); the sense of everything happening at just the right time, the right speed, the right density; the staggering depth of field, from infinity to much too close for comfort; the subtle reference, not only to the real world (but what is really ‘real’ in this aural evocation of an internal super-reality?), but to a musical heritage of which he is fully aware, even if his art now extends beyond this. In Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, this manifests itself in the insistent B natural (si in French, also meaning ‘if’) which permeates the work, recalling what the composer calls ‘the memory of Wozzeck’ (from Berg’s ‘Invention’ on this note in his opera of the same name), and echoing Laing’s repetition of what Nattiez calls ‘the conditional if… [which] becomes obsessive alliteration’. In Forêt profonde the primary musical reference is to Schumann. As Dhomont explains, ‘each of the 13 sections borrows a brief element, a colour, an atmosphere, from the 13 Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood)’.

As ever with works by Dhomont, the listener’s ear in these two remarkable pieces is enhanced by the composer — he makes us hear better than we might otherwise. He makes us aware of connections, of subtle exchanges and interplays; and by contrast, he makes radically different material sound ‘right’, sound organic and logical. He holds the listener in a suspension of belief, in a magical land not unlike the ‘deep forest’ of the imagination, guided — so unusually in this day and age, and so all the more strikingly — by our ears. What Dhomont tells us is true — the proof is the confirmation of aural perception: hearing is believing.

The name of Francis Dhomont needs no introduction to members of CEC or readers of its publications — active in Montréal as composer and teacher for almost twenty years, he is the ‘musical father’ of nearly all of the younger generation of Québécois composers who have made such a mark in the electroacoustic world in the past decade.

The two CDs under review were released together with a timely relaunch of empreintes DIGITALes’ earlier Dhomont double album, Mouvances~Métaphores, this time in the format of two singles, Cycle de l’errance and Les dérives du signe.

Like part of the earlier double album, the two new CDs form a cycle, the Cycle des profondeurs, inspired by psychoanalytic thought. The first piece in the cycle, Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (Under the Glare of a Dark Sun) is based on texts by British psychoanalyst Ronald D Laing; the second, Forêt profonde (Deep Forest) takes the writings of Bruno Bettelheim as its starting point; Dhomont states that there is the possibility of a third work in the cycle, “devoted to the works of Kafka, guided by the writings of Marthe Robert.” If the quality of the two disks under review is anything to go by, I wait for this third piece with great excitement! Sous le regard d’un soleil noir dates from 1979-81, some of it having been composed in the studios of the GRM in Paris (the two CDs are produced in collaboration with GRM); Forêt profonde, according to Dhomont himself, has ‘accompanied’ him for the last fifteen years, its final production occupying him for the two years 1994-96.

The first notable feature of both works is their description as ‘acousmatic melodramas’. There is a substantial amount of text in these pieces and, at almost an hour each, the non-French-speaker might well feel some trepidation about his/her ability to engage in what Dhomont is offering. Indeed, the composer shares this concern — at a recent performance of Forêt profonde here in Birmingham [UK], Dhomont was most anxious that English translations of the texts should be available, even to the extent of having quite a high lighting level in the hall by which to read them during the performance! The sensation of pure sound, however, is so wonderfully controlled that this is much less of a problem than one might suppose, and the richness of the works is such that they will bear many repeated hearings, though additional levels of meaning will, of course, be revealed by study of the texts and translations supplied in the very generous booklets.

Sous le regard d’un soleil noir deals with schizophrenia. It is, like the Laing on which it draws, not about schizophrenia, but is a kind of analog of it. Not only does the material suggest a progressive deterioration into the condition (through, for example, the splitting and distribution of text in ‘self-trios’ and the like) but even the spatial organisation suggests the dichotomies and polarisation implicit in the subject matter: the contrast of very ‘present’ material with highly reverberated sound and tightly focused, almost mono, sounds being subjected to sudden, very stereophonic interjections. It is a characteristic of this piece that such treatments are never simplistic, but always fresh and constantly redefining themselves — always serving to enhance the ‘experience’ (which, of course, we cannot have) of another’s experience. In doing this, as Jean-Jacques Nattiez points out in his introduction to the work, Dhomont ‘constructs a more general myth through which the ‘normal’ man discovers his own schizoid traits’.

Normally I’d take the sounds of the city over the ambience of a forest as the urban soundscape is more eventful and full of the unexpected. Westerkamp, though, is so gentle in her use of environmental sounds that the opening track, A Walk Through The City, doesn’t as convincingly find the composer in her element as Cricket Voice or Beneath the Forest Floor. The care given to these compositions is so delicate that you can’t help but feel as though you’ve entered a marvelous world of sound. What’s peculiar is that these sounds are nothing new to our ears, but the manner in which they’re assembled makes us more aware of the surrounding environment. On Kits Beach Soundwalk you can hear the faint sound of the city in the background, but as the narrative progresses the sound is filtered out in favor of magnifying the small sounds barnacles make. If DJ Shadow can be labeled the Jimi Hendrix of the sampler than it makes perfect sense that Hildegard Westerkamp is the Pauline Oliveros of such devices.