Much layered environmental sound here — stylistically typical for this Canadian label. Pristine field recordings of multiple wildernesses are combined with the more intermittent presence of other highly processed (electronic?) textures. Rushing wind is heard echoing from the horizon..or is a automobiles? Rainfall, crickets, a waterfall? Flood currents sweep you into the sewer drain. Moments later, amongst the hiss of thecurrents, you ear the submerged moans of other victims. It’s dramatic stuff even if your imagination is less morbid than mine. Recommended, especially to those with adequate stereos.

In this recording the influence of R Murray Schafer, and particularly of the idea of an acoustic ecology ideology, is thoroughly present. In it, the experience of listening is a holistic one, arising from the different sources which are brought together into a series of continuous soundscape. As with any ecological music, this totality is seen as representing the diversity, complexity and symbiosis of natural soundscapes. Here then is a music of a truly ecological nature.

The logical ‘in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of musique concrète’ follow-up to 1994’s Électro clips CD, Miniatures concrètes contains three-minute long musique concrète compositions by 24 different composers. The name recognition quotient of this one is similar to that of your average techno sampler, with the only names I can remember having ever been mentioned aloud being Jocelyn Robert and Åke Parmerud, but then again I suspect most ‘big name’ electroacoustic composers probably aren’t in much danger of being mobbed by throngs of adoring fans when they go to the mall, even in France. Miniatures concrètes thus serves as a fine young persons guide to what (and who) is new in electroacoustics throughout the western world at the end of the century. While not-too-many years ago it was forgivable to believe that all ‘serious’ electroacoustic music was confined to the French-speaking world, a whole 3/4 (!) of the artists included here reside outside of France and Québec. Also, the fact that a good share of the composers here are not tenured faculty should hopefully help dispel the idea that musique concrète is purely an academic art form. Heck it even includes two artists associated with the ambiguous music ‘underground’ including Ios Smolders of the acclaimed (by somebody) Dutch group THU20; and, bless my soul, Roger Doyle, who will no doubt be remembered by corporate historians of the future as Bono’s piano teacher, and to the rest of us as the mastermind behind the excellent sound collage album Rapid Eye Movements released by United Dairies all the way back in 1981-under the moniker ‘Operating Theatre’ (it was the ‘industrial’ era after all). Good to see him still alive and releasing numerous unheard-by-anyone albums in the interim.

If there is any sort of unifying thread to Miniatures concrètes (other than the musique concrète thing), it appears that each artist was given three sound sources to manipulate in the realization of their piece, though they were allowed to use any additional sound sources. In at least one case, these sounds were the sole source of the work (Katharine Norman’s oddly clunky Squeaky Reel) and in other cases they sound as though they were tacked on as an afterthought (as in Ned Bouhalassa’s piece, where they appear, unmanipulated, following a short period of silence at the end). Given the cut-and-paste nature of the genre, this compilation has a high degree of continuity (if that is important to you), and on a casual listen it is hard to pick out individual pieces, but the outstanding feature of this collection is its diversity. Miniatures concrètes serves as a fascinating primer of the electroacoustic world as it is today.

The first few pieces are fairly busy sound collage which vary in density and development, and at times gives the impression of some kind of strange, undanceable alien techno. Jacques Tremblay’s opening Le vidoir is particularly dense and nearly as manic as a Carl Stallings cartoon soundtrack. Other memorable pieces include Daniel Toussaint’s La chasse au pougablunk boumeu, an imaginary short film for the ear documenting the ritual hunt of a cruel tarmac-devouring bird, and Robert’s Prélude à «des dieux en conserves», a humorous collage of stock sound clips which is probably the high point of the first quarter of the disc.

The pieces on the second quarter are more spacious, take a little longer to develop, and to me are slightly more satisfying. At times, this stuff approaches what we used to call ‘industrial ambient’ 15 or so years ago, without the cultural baggage that term implies. All are uniformly excellent, though the eerie vibe of Elainie Lillios’s Au deuxième étage and Natasha Barrett’s unsettling Racing Through, Racing Unseen are particularly tasty.

The second half of Miniatures concrètes becomes more abstract and ungraspable and consequently difficult to describe. Textures and moods vary from the dense and noisy (Doyle’s The First Spirit Level) to dark and somber (Sylvia Eckermann & Mathias Fuchs’s Bad Room) to Trente oiseaux-like subtle acoustics and silence (Smolders’ Manga pour l’oreille). The album concludes with the unique nearly song-like A Man is a Delicate Flame by Justice Olsson, which sounds vaguely like a remixed Wyatt-era Soft Machine tape cut into a thousand pieces and scotch-taped back together.

Toronto-based electroacoustic artist Darren Copeland is fond of visual analogies in his work, and uses environmental sounds exclusively — a combination that could easily come off as unappealing to these ears. Mention that you just purchased a recording of ‘environmental sounds’ to most people and they instantly conjure up a serene image of baleen whales swimming in the emerald bay of some picture-postcard faraway place, to an accompaniment of ‘Yanny’-form piano tinklings or (at best) a pleasantly bland Robert Rich-Vidna Obmana electronic wash. Granted empreintes DIGITALes will probably never put out a recording affixed with a dread sticker reading ‘file under New Age,’ it is still quite easy to convince oneself the whole environmental-sound shtick is pretty well played out. Then again, its probably just my problem. The Wire may fawn over the latest Chris Watson field-recording CD as some sorta reaffirmation of the true wonder and danger of the natural world, but as for me, I think I’d rather just listen to my refrigerator. Darren Copeland avoids the trap of ‘sound representing environment’ by manipulating sounds to create completely new and unique environments that envelop rather than sedate the listener. Rendu visible is far more reminiscent of a sonic tidal wave of Aube-an proportion than the digitized wallpaper released daily on Celestial Dilettante and other like-minded labels.

The opening Rendered Visible is the obvious recommended radio cut and also the most overtly ‘nature sound’-ing piece on this collection. It begins by utilizing fairly familiar, recognizable sounds of rain, wind, and jungle animals, layered over other less-recognizable sounds, creating a large crescendo that really blows through the listener like a late afternoon hailstorm on a July day on the high plains, particularly when played at high volume. It soon subsides just as quickly, leaving a few little shore birds to pick at debris, punctuated by subtle low tones played on an African flute by a Ghanaian musician not owned by Mickey Hart. Very nice.

The remaining tracks follow a similar pattern of building up tension through adding layers, but rely more on ‘abiotic sounds’ along the lines of wind and rain and other less ‘natural’, unrecognizable drones and hums, creating a similar but less ‘busy’ effect than the first track. Reaching for Tomorrow sounds less obviously environmental sound-related than the other pieces presented here. This ever-changing ten-minute piece of background tones punctuated by nondescript incidental noises builds more gradually than Rendered Visible but is just as intense, albeit in more a darkly subtle way. Sample any few seconds of this piece and it sounds more like an excerpt from a ‘Cold Meat Industry’ promotional compilation rather than an entry in an international acousmatic composers competition, but the overall impression is much closer to the tape music of, say Vladimir Ussachevsky than to the output of some dreary Swedish goth band.

The concluding 24-minute opus Night Camera is the sparest piece, utilizing sounds from rather familiar and ‘ordinary’ sources (wind, rain, cars passing, people talking in the distance) along with others less recognizable. It too builds through increasing sound layers to a very satisfying level of intensity at several points through the three movements. The conclusion of the piece is almost terrifying, with a distressed, ghostly human voice barely comprehensible through what sounds like a hurricane. Apart from being a great listen in its own right, Night Camera conveys the sense of wonder in experiencing the ‘music’ inherent in the ordinary world around us. While the aforementioned Mr. Watson accumulates frequent flyer miles recording birds in Costa Rica or carnivores on the Serengeti, Copeland manages to create something ten times more captivating from recordings that could very well have been made from a microphone hung outside a conservatory window. I’ll admit that field recordings in and by themselves are often quite marvelous (the most incredible single thing I heard all last year was a coal train coming to a long, gradual stop in the Nebraska badlands), but its the human touch of a composer with a sympathetic ear that can really transform the sounds of the everyday world into something truly otherworldly. Rather than providing an aural document of a specific place and time, Copeland allows the listener to render his/her own unique impression of the sounds contained herein, shaped by their individual connection to the sound world around them, a liberty that is much appreciated around these parts. Rendu visible is a subtle yet intense, familiar, yet alien aural expedition that borders on the overwhelming, and is my absolute pick-of-the litter of the empreintes DIGITALes ‘cheapie’ series thus far.

‘Electroacoustic music’ is a term encompassing an array of music that utilizes recorded sound (traditionally magnetic tape) as an instrument. It can be divided into two broad categories: music which utilizes tape and performers, such as compositions for orchestra and tape, or live interactive music for performer and tape [mixed music], and the more traditional ‘tape music’ based entirely on recorded sound. Tape music did not appear until after World War II (though it had antecedents in Dada and Futurism) when tape recorders became widely available, and were ‘invented’ in France by Pierre Schaeffer (though a few isolated composers ‘discovered’ the process on their own soon after). Schaeffer’s collages of found sound and manipulated tones represented a radical break from contemporary ideas of ‘music’ (in fact he coined a term “musique concrète” to describe his work). They were meant to be heard as abstract sound art, without predetermined notions that sounds necessarily have to be ‘connected’ to the objects that produced them-any ‘meaning’ being assigned by the listener. Musique concrète provided the foundation later for the tape music of serialist composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and eventually stimulated the evolution of electronic music itself.

Tape music has often gotten an undeserved bad rap in this country. Self-consciously hip, mainstream music journalists write it off as an ‘academic’ exercise for university eggheads (even though Schaeffer himself was never trained as a composer or musician), and conservative NPR programmers either ignore it altogether or regard it (along with most ‘weird’ 20th century music) as beyond the pale. Hence most folks have had very little exposure to electroacoustic music, and recordings have been virtually impossible to obtain in this country until recently.

Montréal-based label empreintes DIGITALes is among the first North American labels to actively distribute and promote electroacoustic music exclusively, and their recent Miniatures concrètes CD (reviewed below) is a good sampler of modern musique concrète. Other more widely available (barely) electroacoustic music releases of late include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (ecstatic peace!), The Storm of Drones 3-CD compilation on Sombient/Asphodel (which includes one disc of empreintes DIGITALes artists), and the Testament compilation CD on RRR.

Writing reviews of ‘underground’ music is sometimes a tricky thing. One has to keep in mind that even though someone is a household name in my household, it doesn’t mean that their name is likely to be dropped real often down at the local ‘Pump and Pantry’. I recall Bouhalassa’s name from an appearance on that rather okay Swarm of Drones compilation (Asphodel) from a couple of years back and at the time just figured he was probably Naut Humon’s cousin or a one-time roadie for Rhythm and Noise (or both). When this appeared in the mailbox recently, I was a bit surprised to find out he was an award-winning, up-and-coming sound artists who studied under musique concrète big-leaguer Francis Dhomont, and has been an active promoter of electroacoustic music since 1987. Go figure. Aérosol is an introduction to Bouhalassa’s works from 1990-1998, and reveals him as a very accomplished soundcrafter doing a pretty fine job of making what the French call ‘contemporary music’ sound a bit more contemporary.

When played as a backdrop, most of the music on Aérosol sounds structurally similar to your typical Pierre Schaeffer / Pierre Henry ‘good time oldie’ cut-and-paste tape music regularly pumped into restaurants and bank lobbies throughout the Midwest. But Bouhalassa’s music stands apart from his forbears due to his remarkably diverse and interesting sound palette, which draws heavily on non-traditional and even (gasp!) non-French sources for inspiration. The unintentionally funny liner notes paint him as an overly hip, quasi-nihilist rebel who ‘wigs out’ to Nirvana and Sonic Youth. He also states his love for techno, which he listens to daily, and often dances to until the early hours of the morning (fuckin’ raver), and is photographed hilariously (to me, anyway) in front of some seeming computer-generated montage, shaven headed, peering pensively to the side, looking like any of the myriad of anonymous techno-crats who litter the pages of The Wire these days. Despite the mild ‘hype’, Bouhalassa manages to pull off a pretty amazing feat that some of his new hip acousmatic youth counterparts (e.g. Alain Thibault) do not: to create music with the upbeat energy and vitality of techno and other ‘underground’ musics in a way that involves, rather than pummels, the listener while maintaining a grasp of the traditional style (and spirit) of musique concrète.

The standout ten-minute opening track pretty much sums up Bouhalassa’s style. Jets is an ever-changing, active yet never overly ‘busy’ sound landscape filled with seemingly familiar sounds assembled into a seamless, flowing whole, while maintaining the integrity of its individual elements (yeah, kinda like musique concrète, dude!). A large share of the sound sources for Jets are ‘musical’ and manage to faintly recall every kind of electronic music ever invented, from kosmische tone-float to post-industrial speaker damage. Everytime I hear this, I spot 10 or 20 little sound bits that I think I’ve heard before, on an old Pink Floyd album, early Tangerine Dream, the first This Heat, or anything in the Soleilmoon mailorder catalog, yet when I try to pin those bits down on the next listen, they always seem to elude me. A good share of the sound material Bouhalassa uses is electronic in an up-front, digital and very ‘there’ way (like much techno), but these bits are often embedded in a subtle, yet equally interesting background of lower-end sounds. This disc sounds great (and completely different) on crappy computer speakers as well as expensive headphones, and like most great sound art, sounds slightly different on each listen (it is especially rewarding when played loudly). Bouhalassa always keeps his pieces moving, never allowing them to stagnate or slip into predictability, but all the while he is very patient, allowing his ideas to unfold gradually while maintaining a sense of spontaneity. Its hard for me to describe the overall effect of Jets other than to tag it as a sonic roller-coaster ride, an overworn term that pretty well sums up the effect of most of my favorite tape music.

The next three pieces are similar to Jets, with a few differences in sound material and style. Constamment (autoportrait) is the longest piece and also Bouhalassa’s most overtly ‘techno’ work. It begins in a somewhat restrained, yet colorful way, and then infuses a very unobtrusive illbient backbeat element as a backdrop, which appears and disappears as needed. Attractions follows, which utilizes processed acoustic sound sources, making it the most recognizably musique concrète piece on the album. It opens with the sound of breaking glass, a good old tape music cliché that indicates something of a subtle sense of humor (always welcome in this genre) before moving on to more unfamiliar ground. Where as Attractions uses more traditional methodology to collage sounds, the following piece Move 1 uses MIDI technology to achieve the same ends, but is good nonetheless. Bouhalassa’s use of computer greatly expands the array of sound material available from very limited sources, and I can but hope this work will stand as an example to the legions of MIDI-heads who crank out cratefuls of dull ‘fiddle-dee-dee’ music and fail to take advantage of (or even interest in) the full range of sonics available. Move 1 also contains my favorite sound ‘bit’, a densely layered insect swarm that recalls David Dunn’s excellent ‘Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond’ on the Angels and Insects CD, on Nonsequitur.

The final piece Bouffée délirante is an early piece from 1990 that sounds quite a bit different; an overt attempt at ‘cinema for the ear’ which is not quite as sonically rich as the other pieces, but still a good and very interesting example of an artist ‘groping for a sound’ as Mr. Moon would put it. It relies heavily on the ‘jump cut’, an abrupt edit used to good effect on most of the pieces on this disc, which here tends to come off a bit jarring. Still I’m willing to cut him some slack and recommend Aérosol as a fine point of entry for those acolytes of electronic music who have some interest in exploring electroacoustic territory. Yet another in the uniformly excellent ‘budget series’ from this fine label.

Canadian acousmatic composer Darren Copeland builds evocative soundscapes from environmental recordings. His manipulation of birdsong, sea sounds, and other sources appears minimal, but the three pieces here have a distinctly composed feel, nonetheless. At times the layering grows dense, but it is orchestrated to avoid clutter and conveys the same impression of spaciousness that emerges from more sparsely populated passages. Enhanced documentary for the ear.