Hildegard Westerkamp launched her new album on the Earsay label. Developed over a 10-year period, Into India is based on sounds recorded during her travels in India in the 1990’s. Also availbale: Vector Alpha by Trionys.

Ina-GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales) has just announced the recent release of Sonare and La mémoire des sons by Bernard Parmegiani!

Comment ne pas s’intéresser à deux jeunes artistes dont le premier groupe avait eu la pertinence de se baptiser Napalm Jazz, (également émission de radio), échos lointains des Naked City côtoyant les assauts digitaux de Merzbow. morceaux_de_machines se fait un malin plaisir à brouiller les pistes, à tel point qu’on ne sait vraiment plus si ils ajoutent du bruit à la mélodie ou si ils restreignent le bruit à la mélodie. Acharné de l’improvisation, le duo canadien se lâche volontiers, citant au passage l’Art du bruit de Luigi Russolo ou Anthony Burgess (Orange mécanique) pour soutenir leur discours, leur évocation libre de la création artistique. À cheval entre l’ambient, le jazz, le hip-hop baclé et le bruit blanc, morceaux_de_machines tisse des atmosphères tendues, catharsis numérique de processeurs furibonds et de lignes de programmation effrénées. Paradoxalement, leur musique n’est pas sans évoquer les productions de Deathprod sur Biosphère ou d’un Stock, hausen & walkman remixé par Kevin Drumm… Dontigny et d’Orion se détachent de ces références en gardant une spontanéité et un abandon de soi à leur art. Ou une manière habile de garder le sourire en se bouchant les oreilles.

Nominated for “Album of the year — actuelle, contemporary and electroacoustic music,” Parr(A)cousmatique by guitarist and composer Arturo Parra and Parasites by Diane Labrosse and Martin Tétreault.

No Type are probably best known for their quality back catalog of (free) mp3 / gif offerings at www.notype.com which are, without exception, worth downloading in their entirety. Their welcome move into hardware territory has resulted in a number of releases since 2001’s excellent 2CD The Freest of Radicals. Magali Babin’s Chemin de fer features a collection of digitally massaged textures — simple, yet seductive, the crisp recordings feature the magnified sounds of everyday objects placed within spacious soundfields. Opening with the breathy textures of Triturations, Babin sets the scene perfectly for a series of pristine studies, each one mesmerising. Petit jardin features five magnified minutes of razor sharp textures which throb and sparkle, pulsing through repeated patterns. La corde — the sound of a cord pulled taut before sounds are wrenched from it — is childlike in its simplicity, but anything but simplistic. The very ordinariness of the sounds Babin favours mask a delicate ear and deft touch: Monsieur et madame Watt glistens with high frequency electricity underpinned by low frequency murmur; while E resonates like a digital gamelan. It’s perhaps best to close with No Type’s own, apt, ‘file under’ categorisation of Babin’s work:

File under: microsonic poetry.

An Oeuf Korreckt archive offering an overview of Frederick Blouin’s audio experiments from 1995 till the present, Podweek touches on a number of points of reference: early, unfolded, Autechre; Black Dog Productions; Speedy J; B12; in fact, most Warp output circa its hugely popular ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Series. David Turgeon’s insightful liner notes place Oeuf Korreckt’s overlooked output firmly within this pantheon, arguing that this selection is, “important not only in the context of Blouin’s own musical development, but also as part of a broader history of electronic music.” It’s hard to disagree with this concise definition of an album whose content places it firmly at the crossroads of this period of intensely fertile electronic musical development. Resem One features the hyper-distilled squelch of Aphex Twin circa his ‘Richard D. James’ album (a glance at the respective release dates — both 1996 — comes as no surprise). Before Bedtime meanwhile recalls the clipped melodies of Black Dog’s ‘Spanners’ (again similar release dates, again no surprise). It’s hard to resist these musical comparisons, the overlaps are striking and the comparisons are testament to the fact that the quality of the tracks throughout are superb. A fascinating backwards glance and a long-overdue opportunity to set the record straight, Podweek sounds as fresh now as it surely must have done when its varied tracks were first released.