Bangor New Music festival, held under the auspices of the university’s School of Music, celebrated its 10th anniversary with its most ambitious programme to date, and no concert signalled the event’s energy and range better than the one given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and featuring three firsts.

The school boasts three notable composers – Pwyll ap Siôn, Andrew Lewis and Guto Puw – and works by them made up the challenging first half.

Ap Siôn’s Gwales, dating from 1995, pays homage to the late William Mathias, under whose aegis music flourished at Bangor. Building on fragments quoted from Mozart’s Requiem, the work depicts a journey towards the mythical island of Gwales.

In the first of the new pieces, Andrew Lewis also took us on a journey, this time in and out of consciousness. Number Nine Dream explored the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony through the hazy veil of the contemporary electroacoustic sound-world, making for an absorbing aural experience.

Hologram, by Guto Puw, BBCNOW’s resident composer, exists emphatically in the present, with his ascetic approach to structure balanced by a sensuous engagement with sound. It was delivered with startling clarity by the conductor Grant Llewellyn.

Wales is the spiritual home of the composer Adrian Williams, and the contemplative, questioning vein that its landscape has permitted him to articulate was reflected in his Cello Concerto, premiered here by Raphael Wallfisch. The concerto seeks to reconcile in its single long span an introverted, blues-inflected expressiveness with a freer, unselfconsciously flowing idiom. It was indicative of Williams’s instinctive ability to communicate directly that this was so warmly received by the audience.

Robert Normandeau will premiere the new 26-track version of StrinGDberg on March 27, 2010 at the festival Présences «électronique» in Paris (France).

The work Premières traces du Choucas by Francis Dhomont is presented at the Sonic Artists in Wales (SAW) Electroacoustic Symposium on Match 25, 2010.

Robert Normandeau will present Montréal electroacoustic works on March 24, 2010 at the Soundings concert in Limerick (Irlande). On the programme are works by the composer — Palimpseste, Jeu de langues, and Éden — and by Montréal composers Nicolas Bernier, and Dominic Thibault.

The empreintes DIGITALes label is again invited to participate in the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards events. The 6th edition will take place on April 2 - 3, 2010 at Palais Brongniart (Bourse subway station) in Paris (France). Come and visit us starting at 2 pm at Stand #36! Admission to the Market is free. Jean-François Denis and Christian Zanési will be part of a round table discussion on Pierre Schaeffer’s heritage on April 2; the next day at 6 pm Mathew Adkins will spatialize his Symbiont on the acousmonium.

Ritmi di oggetti, the first track on La Notte fa, is an orgy of stripped-down, fuzz-toned rhythm; the second track, Unlisted Card Number, is all textural dub ambient percussion; and the third piece, Paxil Origami Club, sounds like broken-down and refracted disco, with the flashing lights but minus the cheese. And that’s just the first third of the album. Côté and Dontigny piece together their aural constructions from fragments of pop culture with tapes and electronics, cutting up and reassembling samples from sources as diverse as Maurice Ravel, Don Cherry and Ol’ Dirty Bastard into strange and surprisingly accessible electro-dance delights.