There has always been a certain lightness to Roxanne Turcotte’s works, a lightness seldom experienced in acousmatic music. Désordres, her third album for empreintes DIGITALes, features two hours of works composed between 2003 and 2008. Except for one piece (Sous écoute!, 10 minutes), everything here is either short or made of short movements. Just because her ideas are exposed in short durations doesn’t mean her artistic approach isn’t as “deep” as other empreintes DIGITALes composers. Simply, she adopts a more “popular” approach, i.e. often her message is more immediately tangible, sensible, and less mediated through culture. Just for that, Désordres makes an excellent initiation to sound art. However, that being said, paradoxically, by being so long (two hours, nine works), the album gets a bit incoherent, and this lack of cohesion is reflected in its longest work, the 41-minute suite Musée sonore, whose sequence of movements seems a bit haphazard. Released as a DVD-Audio with 5.1 and stereo mixes.

Troisième disque sous ce label montréalais pour l’électroacousticienne, et la surprise est toujours au rendez-vous. Des étonnantes prises de son de Musée sonore (40 minutes!) à la musique mixte d’Espace vital, sans oublier une pointe d’humour ici et là, Roxanne Turcotte se fait plaisir et nous intrigue pendant tout près de deux heures. Des bribes de paroles sorties de nulle part viennent ajouter un peu de surréalisme à ces univers sonores féériques, et les pensées de l’auditeur s’envolent dans toutes les directions. Pour ouvrir la porte de l’univers électroacoustique, c’est le genre de production idéale. Il s’agit d’un DVD-Audio, alors tout ça, qui est déjà superbe en stéréo, est aussi offert en 5.1; imaginez.

A very fine musique concrete album that shows, once more, how important Nicolas Bernier is in today’s electroacoustic music landscape. A loaded work, but solidly organized and captivating. A perfectly defined compositional arc. First released on LP, now available on CD, the disc being housed in the original LP jacket. The CD includes a bonus track: Bernier’s contribution to the trans_canada project previously released on empreintes DIGITALes.

Hot shit musique concrète found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the ’50s and ’60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier’s work isn’t nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier’s work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He’s aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes Les chambres de l’atelier towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.

Engrossing side of dynamic modern musique concrète by this French-Canadian artist. Already praised by The Wire as “utterly compelling”, Bernier works with the splicing skill of a film editor on usure.paysage to weave a disorienting narrative of disjointed high definition samples and stray sonics. A diffuse rendering and microscopic attention to detail heightens the immersive, hyperreal effect of his persistently shifting arrangements: he never settles on one sound for long, each fragment is placed, swiped away, and juxtaposed with others with a considerate and intriguing flow with never gets tedious or feels random. Over four pieces, ranging from 3 to 11 minutes, we’re wrenched from rattling trains carriages to explosive klangs, extruded through inimitably textured, frictional clouds of heck-knows-what to ear-craning pauses populated with tinkling bells, via stereo-strafing cars and fluid waves of digital static. If you’ve been following Giuseppe Ielasi’s Senufo Editions, in particular the Oreledigneur and Raionbashi sides, or picked up Reinhold Freidl’s Inside Piano LP, this will surely capture your imagination.

Widely praised as “utterly compelling musique concrete” upon its vinyl release in February, Nicolas Bernier’s usure.paysage now sees a limited CD issue with an added track. Bernier’s previously worked with electroacoustics in more performance-based settings but it’s here where he truly excels. Like a film editor Bernier demonstrates particular skill at concocting narrative from the disparate juxtaposition of sounds, but this is not his aim. Rather, sounds are forced to collide, conform and clash with their neighbours, creating unusual blends and hybrids with characters independent from their source. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The four-part work begins with an immediacy to be expected: short bursts of high-volume industrial noise, but this soon parts allowing for a richer array of sounds to be heard. Passing cars, horns, faint Arabic chant, amorphous bass rumble, the tinkering of sharp metallic objects, rasped wood; all carefully laid over a subdued bed of barely audible rustle and pockets of silence. These intersections are frequently thrilling: the frenzied blips and bell tones meeting the closing of an electric door heard midway through part 2’s Les chambres de l’atelier; the brief moments of looped activity riding over dub grey Tim Hecker haze; the shuffled gravel? snow? rice? of 10 passages. The bonus track k.krrkphsssPOW < paysage provides further evidence of Bernier’s knack for abstract sound, a pointillist collage of static tics and digital fizz proceeding along symphonic lines, more portentous but less convincing than the studied detachment of the title work.