Christian Bouchard presented his first solo disc Fractures on February 14 2004 during the Rien à voir (15) festival while Denis Smalley remastered the works from his 1992 disc — which has been out of print for over a year — for the brand new Impacts intérieurs now available.

This is a casual listening path, an invitation to travel — not a guided tour per se, more of an itinerary, akin to Romantic-era travel literature. So this will be a listening itinerary, an invitation to discover a highly subjective selection of electroacoustic composers from a specific corner of the world. Our destination: Northern Europe.

France reigns over European electroacoustic music like a despotic queen. The persisting influence of Pierre Schaeffer’s work — even more than 50 years after the invention of what he has called “musique concrète” — and the gravitational pull of the Ina-GRM tend to hide from the rest of the world the work being accomplished elsewhere in Europe.

So let’s start our journey in one of France’s neighbors, Belgium. The country owes much of its electroacoustic activity to Annette Vande Gorne, the indefatigable animator of the Musiques & Recherches center. Her music displays a strong sense of serenity, something rare in the field of tape music. Tao, a cycle about the five base elements (air, earth, metal, fire and water), remains a classic. In it she explores every possible transformation of the sounds associated to these elements with an uncommon level of artistry and poetry. A student of Vande Gorne, Stephan Dunkelman has picked up on her grace, a grace he transmutes into movement. Often the result of a collaboration with choreographers, his works are driven by an inner force that substitutes the sensuality of movement to Vande Gorne’s philosophical — almost mystical — depth. His pieces Rituellipses and Thru, Above and Between, released on the album Rhizomes, deserve your attention.

A jump across the Northern Sea and we set foot on English ground. Birmingham has become an important creative node in electroacoustic music, thanks to the work of composer Jonty Harrsison and his Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (better known as BEAST), a laboratory for experimentation and sound diffusion that has helped many talented composers in developing their art. Harrison’s music is an essential listen. His piece Klang (released on Évidence matérielle) ranks among the best-known electroacoustic works of the last 25 years. His precise sound constructions and his distinctive way of compressing sound matter into streams of energy put him up there with Pierre Henry, Francis Dhomont and Bernard Bernard Parmegiani. One can follow the traces of his techniques into the works of Adrian Moore, one of his students, especially in the latter’s fondness for putting simple sound sources (marker on a white board, tin foil) through complex transformations. Sieve, from the album Traces, uses a catchy playfulness to make this transformative process transparent.

Denis Smalley was born and raised in New Zealand, but he has been living in the UK since the mid-‘70s. His contributions to the acousmatic corpus and to the development of sound diffusion make him not only the contemporary but in a sense the acolyte of Harrison. Furthermore, the two composers share a similar interest in form and in the choreographed displacement of abstract sound objects through space and time. Wind Chimes (on Impacts intérieurs) and Base Metals (on Sources/Scènes) are good illustrations of the slightly cold yet fascinating beauty of his music. John Young, one of his students — and another New-Zealander who studied and now teaches in England), follows a similar approach, although he replaces Smalley’s elemental sound sources with more emotionally charged images. The works featured on his CD La limite du bruit offer to the listener several occasions to dive into his or her own memories, the sound of a squeaky swing or a creaky door turning into avatars of Proust’s madeleine. Time, Motion and Memory is a choice cut.

Scandinavian electroacoustic music is still too largely ignored on our side of the Atlantic, but empreintes DIGITALes’ catalog allows us to make a short stop to round up our peregrinations. Natasha Barrett has studied with Harrison and Smalley and has been involved in BEAST, but since 1998 she has elected Norway as her base camp. There, she has stepped away from the style of her teachers and has sought inspiration in the Nordic cold. Her Three Fictions, released on Isostasie, deserve many listens. And let me bring this listening path to an end with one of the key composers in electroacoustic music today, the Swedish Åke Parmerud, whose Renaissance (on Jeu d’ombres) pays tribute to the analog synthesizer without resorting to nostalgic tricks.

The last album that I heard that worked the same way as Books on Tape’s new one, Sings the Blues, was King of Woolworth’s charmer, Ming Star. Not that they sound remotely like each other, mind you, but both of these electronic albums have the same appeal. Neither artist is trying to turn electronic music on its ear; instead of pushing the proverbial envelope, they’re just happy in their own little niche. Ideas may be recycled from other artists’ work, and this music isn’t anything that will make your jaw hit the floor the first time you hear it, but given time you feel yourself warming up to the music until you realize that, in its own innocuous way, the material is well-crafted, accessible, and quite enjoyable.

Books on Tape, the moniker of Los Angeles artist Todd Drootin, keeps things amazingly simple, compared to many of his peers. Sings the Blues is yet another clever laptop collage of samples and beats, but compared to more ambitious fare like Four Tet and Manitoba, he works more like a jazz artist, establishing a very simple primary melody in a song and just letting loose for the duration of the piece, acting as a cut-and-paste soloist. It’s a 65-minute mishmash of myriad musical styles that is sometimes dark, sometimes warm, the overall tone of the record changing with almost every track, but in the end that’s half the fun.

Credit Drootin’s girlfriend Kerri for inspiring him to create this album. Drootin plundered her personal record collection, covering a wide variety of genres, for sampling ideas, and as it turns out, the idea worked out quite well, sometimes magnificently. Sings the Blues is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek title, which Drootin alludes to in the brief intro Laptop Blues, a track that basically consists of a lazy, amateurish acoustic guitar progression that’s given a silly, slightly warped effect by Drootin. Republic Of gets down to more serious business, however, as it mines the languid, funky trip hop sounds of early Massive Attack, minimal samples of guitar, fretless bass, and strings providing a murky, noir-like tone. See You In Tokyo sounds just as sinister, but this time the song is propelled by an acoustic drum sample (note the outstanding use of the ride cymbal sample), and has more of an early ’80s electro touch. The terrific She’s Dead To Me cranks up the intensity, a frenzied blend of synth bleeps, screeches, and frenetic beats, while the more dance-oriented Pointe du pied and Girls Up Front are more playful, each possessing whimsical melodies.

The latter half of the album returns to the darker side of Books on Tape’s sound. The careening Death In the Sex Shop sounds like a video game soundtrack, with its frantic jungle beats and siren-like synths adding to the song’s menacing, nocturnal feel. The song immediately segues into Siberian Soundsystem, one of the album’s most inspired moments, as Drootin adds swirling noise that weaves in and out of the stark breakbeats, making for a harrowing, enthralling listening experience. But the true highlight of Sings the Blues is the seven-and-a-half-minute The Crucial, an entrancing, intoxicating blend of a slow, insistent drum sample, a looped acoustic guitar riff, and a brief saxophone sample that repeats throughout the track. Over the course of the song, Drootin throws in various samples, like electric piano, flute, synth, jungle-like snare drum samples, and electric guitar, making the song an extended, free-form solo. The sax may add an instantly recognizable sound that would strike the listener as being “jazzy”, but it’s what Drootin does with the other elements of the track, his spontaneity and inventiveness, that makes this song more jazz-influenced than the usual electronic piece.

Sings the Blues does run a little long (65 minutes), and it would have been nice to hear Drootin continue in the direction of The Crucial, but for the most part he manages to keep things fresh. The album might hit a speed bump here and there, but the ride is mostly fun, and never dull.

Jean-François Denis est un pilier important de la communauté électroacoustique montréalaise. On discute avec lui des séries de concerts MusMix (2) et Rien à voir (15), présentées ce mois-ci par l’organisme Réseaux.

Il ne se passe pas grand-chose du côté de la scène électroacoustique montréalaise sans que Jean-François Denis y soit pour quelque chose. Directeur de la maison de disques empreintes DIGITALes, seule étiquette québécoise qui ne fasse paraître que des disques de musique électroacoustique, il dirige aussi DIFFUSION i MéDIA, la porte d’entrée chez nous d’un bon nombre d’étiquettes étrangères du même genre. Le disque Jalons, de Francis Dhomont, qui remportait le 25 janvier dernier le prix Opus du «Disque de l’année — Musiques actuelle, électroacoustique», c’est empreintes DIGITALes qui l’a publié; une étiquette qui célébrait ses 14 ans le 31 janvier dernier. Jean-François Denis est aussi membre, avec les compositeurs Gilles Gobeil et Robert Normandeau, de la société de concerts Réseaux, qui présente ce mois-ci deux importantes séries: MusMix, une collaboration avec le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM) et le Centre de création musicale Iannis Xenakis (CCMIX), et Rien à voir, dont la 15^e édition sera aussi la dernière.

MusMix: Si vous lisez ces lignes le jour de leur publication, il ne reste qu’un concert à la série MusMix. Jean-François Denis explique: «Le projet est assez précis. Il s’agit d’un événement biennal qui présente des musiques mixtes de compositeurs canadiens. On sait que le Québec est internationalement reconnu en ce qui concerne la musique électroacoustique, mais la musique mixte reste quelque chose de moins courant. Par ailleurs, ce sont surtout les compositeurs de musique instrumentale qui font de la musique mixte; alors, même si ces concerts peuvent attirer un public amateur de musique électroacoustique, il s’agit souvent de compositeurs qui lui sont moins connus. Mélanger l’instrumental et l’électronique, ça donne peut-être le genre de musique le plus délicat à mener à bien». Mais comme le programme est le fruit d’un appel d’offres largement diffusé et pour lequel les organisateurs reçoivent de nombreuses propositions, la sélection proposée offrira le meilleur des deux mondes. Avec l’expertise de Réseaux en matière de diffusion de musique électroacoustique et avec celle du NEM dans l’interprétation des musiques contemporaines, les conditions optimales sont réunies pour une soirée réussie. On y présentera deux créations, de Martin Bédard et Alcides Lanza, qui participaient déjà à la première édition il y a deux ans et dont les œuvres avaient été remarquées par un représentant du CCMIX qui a invité les compositeurs à venir travailler sur une nouvelle œuvre à Paris. Aussi au programme: Andrew Staniland, Kotoka Suzuki, John Oliver, Farangis Nurulla-Khoja et Monique Jean. (Le 6 février, 20 h, Salle Beverly Webster-Rolph du Musée d’art contemporain.)

Rien à voir: Ce mois de février 2004 nous amène du même souffle la 15^e et dernière édition de la série de concerts Rien à voir, qui célèbre depuis 1997 la musique acousmatique (diffusée, dans la pénombre, par un orchestre de 24 haut-parleurs encerclant le public). «Réseaux est en repositionnement au sujet de la façon de présenter ses concerts, explique Jean-François Denis. Bien sûr, présenter huit concerts en cinq jours, c’est économique et efficace, mais c’est dur pour le public qui voudrait tout suivre, alors on cherchera une meilleure façon de faire. Idéalement, ce serait plutôt quelque chose comme un concert par mois, mais c’est une tout autre histoire, notamment au niveau budgétaire…» Ce genre de projet serait possible dans un lieu dédié à ce type de diffusion, c’est pourquoi Réseaux est partenaire avec le NEM et les Productions SuperMusique dans un projet visant à mettre sur pied une «maison» regroupant les activités des trois organismes. Un lieu où seraient réunies musiques actuelle, contemporaine et électroacoustique. On croit rêver. «On y travaille, acquiesce Jean-François Denis, mais c’est un gros projet qui se développe lentement.» D’ici là, c’est à l’Espace Go que l’on ira entendre Randall Smith, Hildegard Westerkamp, Andrew Lewis et Yves Daoust, du 11 au 15 février.

Back in the day, I saw a group called Disc play live. Their members — including a young unknown going by the handle Kid606 — took a pocket knife to their CD pile and incorporated their scratched-up play into a mix of power electronics. Using methods that are almost passé by today’s standards, Disc floored me with blasts of The Spice Girls skipping at random over low frequency white noise and digital fuckery. It was dumb, goofy fun, surrounded by loose, highbrow concepts and gifted with enchanting results — pop culture, damaged and regurgitated into something new, exciting and, dare I say it, entertaining.

Max Haiven and Jon Vaughn, two student activist/artists, attempt to do something in the same ballpark — as humorless as it is — with Front, their first documented full-fledged release. Within the album’s 73 minutes and 33 nameless tracks, the duo explores the points at which attitudes intersect with aesthetic choices. Their distrust of the latter begs the question, “What is art? What is pop music?”; they seem to believe that there’s not as much separation as you might think. To demonstrate, Haiven and Vaughn throw all sorts of folky instrumentation and skipping/looping pop recordings into a stark experimental stew of Difficult listening. And that’s Difficult with a capital “D”. Granulated drones and austere digital atmospherics provide a foundation for the occasional wisps of familiarity — an acoustic guitar, a snippet extracted untidily from the radio, a stray vocal — that snap us back into the real world. It’s a hard road for an ear to travel, and it shows that, however profound Haiven and Vaughn’s mission, it’s much easier to get a handle on their concept than on the music itself.

The duo’s actual approach is unknown, but a record like Front, without any discernible structure, would almost have to have some extemporaneous elements dropped in on the fly. In fact, the two are seasoned in the art of electroacoustic improv, having performed live together and with others at various musical events in Canada. Their sounds unfold organically, sometimes beautifully; the interruptions and incoherence of this long piece are its structure. There is a chunk in the middle of the album that is nothing more than an oscillating organ note, held down over the course of four tracks. Why these tracks were broken into lengths of 1’14”, 2’11”, 0’17” and 4’02” is unimportant. The arbitrary methods adopted by Haiven and Vaughn are about rejecting convention, and, while that’s hardly a costly stance in the context of experimental music, Front gets its point across in joyless fashion. Thing is, it’s an impossible thing to pull off, entirely — their glitchy loopage is not exactly a novelty — but the boys know this. Their talents as sound sculptors speak for themselves (check out track 24, an impressive percussive montage) and, in the end, the pair make an interesting racket that succeeds on its own merits, concepts aside. That said, gimme The Spice Girls enhanced by a pocket knife any day.

Three tracks recorded in Glasgow, two in Bamberg, Germany by Swiss viola player Charlotte Hug and Canadian laptop musician Chantale Laplante. Sounds from the laptop are diffused in ways that effectively reconfigure both the performance and the space of listening. Hug’s additional use of electronics heightens the sense of a reverberant multidirectional music. She uses radically unorthodox bowing techniques on her viola, yet in this decentred live electroacoustic context each frictional rasp and shrill glide of the bow are assertions of the viola’s identity in defiance of the featureless swell and boom projected from the computer and the nameless sounds Laplante inserts around the sonic field.

It’s tempting to conceptualise the viola as an originary place, a sound source with a history and a well-defined culture and to cast the laptop as a space of reception and transmission, sounds passing through but never belonging or conferring an identity. That distinction is undoubtedly problematic. Certainly the impact of the laptop in improvised music is considerable, its implication far-reaching, posing all sorts of new challenges for acoustic instrumentalists. Brilliant Days registers that impact, raises those implications, confronts those challenges, as Hug’s viola asserts itself or moves electronically out of its body.