The alteration of sound is also the alteration of our perception, and no one better than Francis Dhomont can explain this parallelism while obtaining the most astonishing artistic results from it. The extremes of a studio manipulation have never sounded more effective: Dhomont’s ability to transform inorganic materials in something that sounds biotic — even natural, like in the virtual marine elements of Je te salue, vieil océan! — is the basis of his greatness. The five compositions of this CD present, in the composer’s words, structures that “attempt to avoid traditional music codes, disregarding their imperatives”. The subtle transformations and sudden changes of dynamics related to the sonic continuum of a piece like Chroniques de la lumière — almost half an hour of evolutions that range from the vague presence of aural symptoms to the imaginary representations of astral bodies — are enough to keep our fascination at full steam, just like kids left with their mouths agape when meeting something unexpected and wonderful. In that sense, the mechanism that links Dhomont’s music to our physical response is one that explores a system working through very simple principles, and for that very reason achieving the most important conclusions. These soundscapes satisfy both an aesthetic canon and the need of moving forward and finding new life in the creative dismemberment of a source which, at 81, this man still does with the cultural and scientific enthusiasm of a young student. Music with a high rate of emotional value in one of the best acousmatic releases of 2007.

Vanavond in Folio aandacht voor een ‘Grande Dame et un Grand Monsieur de la Musique Concrète’, de bijna 70 jarige Marcelle Deschênes en de pas 80 jaar geworden legende Francis Dhomont.

Op het Canadese label empreintes DIGITALes is van beide nu een overzichts-CD verschenen en met recht, want zowel mevrouw Deschênes en meneer Dhomont zijn gelauwerde veteranen en hebben een respectabele staat van dienst binnen de elektro-akoestische muziek.

Francis Dhomont heeft zelfs aan de wieg gestaan van dit begrip, toen hij in Parijs in de jaren ‘40 experimenteerde met ‘magnetisch geladen draden’ en zo de term ‘Musique Concrète’ ontlokte bij monde van de een van de belangrijkste grondleggers, Pierre Schaeffer. Iets jonger en wellicht iets minder legendarisch is Marcelle Deschênes. Zij zich vooral toe op audiovisueel werk en multimedia. Haar CD petits Big Bangs is een retrospectief van haar elektro-akoestische werk gemaakt tussen 1976 en 2002.

With a festival as inherently risk-taking as the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), it’s a given that some shows will work better than others. There may also be failed experiments, but it’s to the festival’s credit that it doesn’t rely on the tried-and-true. Invariably, even the less-successful performances are, at the very least, worth checking out.

Day three of the 24th edition of FIMAV was all about operating without a safety net — and, as usual, within a wide array of musical contexts — with some of this year’s most and least successful shows yet. […]

Victoriaville matière sonore

Contrasting with Signal Quintet’s performance, Victoriaville matière was a strong idea on paper that didn’t always succeed in the implementation. The premise was good: construct a forum for a number of composers/sound artists to create individual pieces based on field recordings made around the Victoriaville area. Have the process overseen by renowned experimental blender of natural and industrial sounds, Francisco López, and link the pieces together into a single work with a broader overriding arc. In addition to López, Aimé Dontigny, Louis Dufort, Chantal Dumas, Steve Heimbecker, Mathieu Lévesque, Hélène Prévost and Thomas Phillips all contributed to the 90-minute show.

Similar to the Theresa Transistor performance on Day Two, but in the larger Colisée venue, the artists were placed in the center of the hall, surrounded on all sides by the audience and with a sound system facing in around the periphery of the hall. With the equipment setup on a riser with minimal blue lighting, there was little for the audience to watch, encouraging it, instead, to simply absorb the sounds without visuals and to find meanings on a more personal and imagination-driven level.

The eight pieces were linked by a nature recording of birds, used to allow one artist to leave the center stage so that the next could take his/her place. Other than FIMAV CEO and Artistic Director Michel Levasseur’s usual spoken introduction to the show, there was no applause between pieces, nor was there any announcement of order of events, so it was impossible to know whose pieces belonged to whom.

Intriguing sounds were many and diverse, ranging from the natural to the artificial, and there was considerable processing applied. Like Theresa, equal importance was given to where individual sounds appeared and to how they traveled around the aural landscape. The problem was that, to a large extent, the approaches used were obvious and often overly dramatic. Lacking the nuance of Signal Quintet (and, because these were solitary pieces, the interaction of the earlier performance), the overall levels were high, the sounds often overly dense and the collages often too busy for the listener to sense any sort of unified statement.

Sometimes it’s good to make the audience come to the music rather than the other way around, and a better balance of dynamics and more discernable narrative for each piece would have made the entire show more successful. Still, credit is due for an imaginative experiment that, some shortfalls notwithstanding, was well worth pursuing.

Au travers de six plages éblouissantes, le label montréalais nous propose un survol attractif de l’œuvre de cette compositrice méconnue. Une sélection qui, de 1976 à 2002, nous emmène dans un univers expansif, vif et lumineux à l’intérieur duquel notre imaginaire se laisse avantageusement abuser.

In the world of composers like Adrian Moore things do not evolve around making CDs, but on playing concerts, preferable on multi-speaker systems for a seated audience (with an arty facial hair, thick glasses, sipping wine. I’m joking here, right?). So it’s been a while since we reviewed Traces, his previous CD by him — see Vital Weekly 298 — and Rêve de l’aube has pieces from the years 2000-04. Moore deals with electroacoustic music: from the power tools in Power Tools (not software, but let’s say real hardware such as a lawn mower) to field recordings of water, children, Venetian gondolas, horses and the piano — how lovely it is when these things are described on the cover. All of the sounds are fed through a wondrous mirage of electronics and bounces back and forth, up and down. Like music on empreintes DIGITALes usually does. It clearly defined style of music, which to my, perhaps perhaps, not enough trained ears, sounds like working through a formula. On one end you feed the sounds in and due to some trademark apparatus the music as we hear comes out at the end. Having said that, I think that Adrian Moore produces some nice music, especially the closing piece Sea of Singularity is quite moving: horses, ducks, the subway and in In Paradisum (the separate parts have titles) and perhaps the religious texture of that is what appealed to me. Not a spectacular disc, but certainly one of the better ones from the label.

Apparently starting off from a work for instrument-and-tape format, these pieces broaden the concept in several directions: the instrument featured is an early electronic one (ondes Martenot) and the electronic backcloth features a three-dimensional, spatialized character rendering the interaction between both far more complex. The compositions feature a sophisticated mixture of concerns ranging from concrete sources, sophisticated electronic textures exploring the legacy of acoustic sound masses of contemporary ascendancy and an original musical gesture, managing to orchestrate complex sound in a coherent whole.