Magali Babin se fraye un chemin à travers la matière grise. Matière froide, sans âme, elle tente de lui donner vie. D’une lame en acier trempé à un couvercle de casserole, Magali Babin explore tous les alliages du métal. Fonte de l’enregistrement. Elle forge les sons. Torsion, martèlement, étirement, soudure, cisaillement. Les voix se multiplient et bientôt se perdent dans la grisaille d’une pluie de limaille de fer. Corrosion. Le rythme s’oxyde progressivement. Les enregistrements (tels des photographies) sont punaisés au mur en guise de souvenir. Estompage de la mémoire. Grattage de la surface rouillée pour lui redonner son éclat. Donne à réfléchir.

Diane Labrosse takes pleasure in absurdity, harmony, dissonance, structure and improvisation. Her fascination with unconventional sounds has led her to digital sampling, to which she brings a hard-core approach. For the last fifteen years she has regularly appeared on contemporary, improvised and avant-garde music stages both in Canada and in Europe. Some of her projects are done with Île bizarre (Ikue Mori & Martin Tétreault), L’Oreille à vincent with Christof Migone, Michel F Côté, Martin Tétreault and sound sculptor Jean-Pierre Gauthier.

A self-taught composer, Aimé Dontigny is one of the founding members of the “free-noise” collective Napalm Jazz and of the electronic duo morceaux_de_machines. Dontigny has been working for empreintes DIGITALes and Ambiances Magnétiques. He devotes himself eagerly to the challenges of improvised music and is particularly interested in the development of new electronic music in Canada. His compositions are full of subtle quotes and his sonic palette adapts itself to many aesthetics, as reflected in his recent collaborations with Diane Labrosse

This collaboration is found on Télépathie a new release by No Type records. It is an intense listen, with a loud blend of sounds, movement and ambience. Recorded live on April 20th, 2002 this release captures the direct approach of their unique improvisations. Télépathie is a must for fans of noise, collage, explosions and just plain weird stuff. It definitely pushes the boundaries in music, composition, writing methods and approaches.

After a couple of years of building up an impressive catalog of MP3 and CD-R releases, Todd Drootin of Books on Tape has really pulled out the stops for his first official full-length album. Recording live in the studio to 24-track tape using a set-up based almost exclusively around oid school sound gear, and inviting in a slew of guests including Kerri Kirchheimer on drums and his sister Stefanie Drootin of Bright Eyes on keyboard and vocals, Drootin has put together an exciting and dynamic set that wonderfully meshes his punk and indie-rock roots with his current proclivities for knob twiddling and key pressing.

The material on Throw Down Your Laptops sounds unlike pretty much any other record I’ve heard in quite some time, which is an achievement in a genre that is strewn with so many sound-alikes. Drootin throws down a strong base of thick electro melodies and beefy beats that range from downtempo cool to a jackhammer frenzy. These elements are often left alone to happily co-mingle, but Drootin is also generous with his guests, allowing them to have a strong influence, especially on tracks like The Contenders, a short but sweet collaboration with electro-noise-rock trio Rose For Bohdan. So while Throw Down Your Laptops may not be a record that will change your life, you can at least be guaranteed that it won’t sound like anything else in your collection, and when it comes to today’s electronic music scene, that’s really saying something.

Another guitar based album from empreintes DIGITALes, not only that but the guitar is dramatically obvious! This is quite an surprising and unusual album — Parra is a classically trained guitarist who has become interested in “performance, creation and composition of contemporary pieces,” and electroacoustic music. He commissioned five well known composers to create tape pieces for him (largely from his own playing, I think) and then has played a live guitar solo over the top. The result is astonishing in its beautiful combination of the chopped microscopic drama of the tape with the skilled guitar playing; unusual in both its conception and its label — this is one of the more melodic works released through empreintes DIGITALes. A fiery skittery opening to La basilique fantome with Stéphane Roy a cloud of tiny fragments, the guitar is slick and smooth in comparison playing a strong rhythmic melody; another crescendo before an extended guitar solo over a density of notes that sounds like an organ; another climax before some rapid picking and improv playing over a little noisey tape before returning to the opening melody. Throughout there are occasional vocalisations. Another big electroacoustic in-yer-face opening after which Mauricio Bejarano’s D’or et de lumière becomes a more settled array of clicky creaks echoed stretched and hisses (including some notes) with spanish guitar. A lovely solo over soft cracking and clicking emphasises that these composers have considered the pieces not only as stand alone, but also taken in to account the requirements of a duet. A restrained climax includes some short string picking. A more obvious tape backing to Sol y sombra… L’espace des spectres from Francis Dhomont swirls and slides skitters and scintillates with a rapid strumming guitar; a melodic solo over scraping electro-environment, and there is a confusion between tape and guitar as they seem to trade improv licks to a rapid guitar and string scrape conclusion. A slow burning development opens Soledad droning and thudding with rapid soft scrape guitar, then rapid extended sounds from Gilles Gobeil that builds to a couple of very noisy climaxes with dramatic guitar, with whispering and breathing that creates a dramatic contrast to the opening. L’envers du temps with Robert Normandeau lays creaking taps spiralling smallnesses as a cloud against rapid guitar, both easing, then developing again in parallel with strange whizzing and guitar to a chittering scrape end. The premiere performance appears to have featured both the acousmatic pieces and the duets, and this would have made an interesting double release with the taped pieces alone on a separate disk. However, as it stands it is a remarkable performance by all concerned and represents a powerful introduction to acousmatic (and all the synonyms) music. A complex album and wonderful, while maintaining the genre’s intensity.

Burgeoning local leftfield label No Type comes on strong with the second release in their ‘abstract’ series, proving that they are certainly a label to watch out for. On the first track, the half-hour long ambient epic Lift With the Knees, Canadian duo Coin Gutter (Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott) manage to straddle the line between noise and ambient/concrète electronic music favouring mood over melody. Bursts of noise interrupt echoed and pitched-down classical string samples as operatic vocals and conversation samples are glitched and stuttered. Coin Gutter manage a restrained density that, at the same time, sounds pleasing to the ear. 8/10