Contemporary musique concrète from Canada on Lames de fond (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 22178), credited to two Quebec musicians — the composer Martin Bédard, currently teacher at Montréal, and the flautist and composer Marie-Hélène Breault.

Bédard (he also made Topographies for this label in 2013) seems to be a real heavy-hitter; part of his philosophy is to “question the grammar of sonic organisation” in digital audio composition, and this sort of no-prisoners ethic might be detectable in the opening salvo Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1). Prepare for about 18 mins of ruthless bombardment and remorseless sweeps of over-loaded, layered sound coming at you like 18 tidal waves. Apparently he drew inspiration from bees making honey; in the simple act of honey-production, he perceives a very lengthy and complex process, resulting in an elaborate structure. Plus it’s also rich in symbolism and a handy metaphor for various acts of transformation, which evidently occupy the mind and hands of any self-respecting digital composer today. Phew. I know I’m always asking for more “incident” in this genre of music, and now here it is in abundance.

Only slightly less exhausting is 𝄆Extensio:Warm:Up𝄇, co-composed with Breault, and showcasing her flute sounds — often radically transformed inside the digital workstation, reprocessed, recomposed and changed into something that’s both quite alien, and also amounts to a layered, impossible, hyper-orchestra of multi-dimensional flutes from beyond the Planet Jupiter. This one isn’t propounding a concept like the ‘Honey’ thing, and instead is mainly about technique and method — in this case loops and layers — applied to those moments when a musician is just warming-up before the main performance. (Fun fact: apparently this is how Marvin Gaye captured a great saxophone lick from a session man on What’s Going On, who thought he was just doodling away and yet ended up on the finished record.)

Another piece self-consciously drawing attention to its own method is Replica, drawing subtle distinctions between “pure instrumental sound and rebuilt sound” within its terrifying labyrinthine passages. It hopes thereby to make some philosophical point about being reborn and changed and yet remaining the same. A pretty overpowering, intense set, but these composers are working overtime to bring you profound sonic transformations, heaped up in abundance. From 2nd March 2023.

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A wide-ranging electroacoustic performance artist, Emma hails from Derby (England) but studied her art in Birmingham, and has since worked at many other places.

As with fellow empreintes DIGITALes artist Ingrid Drese, this would seem to be Emma’s solo album debut, but unlike Ingrid’s long-form minutes, all of which are of a quite dynamic and sometimes startling nature, mixing up the obvious and the vastly manipulated. Thus she’s Leicester’s Louise Rossiter in her approach.

There’s certainly a lot to take-in when listening to works as dramatically crafted as these, which of course makes it engaging and well worth repeated listening.

A Belgian electroacoustic composer, rooted in more conventional forms (she was trained as a pianist) with quite a career behind her and, excepting a couple of tracks on various artists collections, here debuting with her first solo electroacoustic album. The four lengthy works presented here all feature use of sounds that have been totally mutated beyond their source recordings, being layered, twisted, multi-layered and/or folded over themselves, along with some recognisable sounds occasionally showing through — some traffic, breathy vocal expressions, aquatic, metallic, environmental and subterranean type sonics as well. Elements of Luc Ferrari and Michel Redolfi come to mind, yet it’s clearly a different and original mind at work here.

Yet another new name to me, and the first of three female artists on empreintes DIGITALes featured here. Ana’s a Montréal, Canada, based composer, and this would seem to be her second album, after the 2018 release Nano-Cosmos which I haven’t heard as yet.

Featuring eight tracks in its 62 minutes, Radiolaria ranges from a 1-minute piece of electronic gabble through to three much bigger works in the region of 11 to 14 minutes, and four more of a moderate length. The release starts with the startling sonic scatters of Mare Buchlae, which is quite possibly what the title implies, water sounds processed through the credited Buchla 200 synthesizer. That method of working seems to be the basis of much of the music here that mixes acoustics and electronics, some of it composed, some of it improvised. In all, it makes for quite different empreintes DIGITALes release.

Nel 1941 il padre di John Young fu annoiato nell’esercito neozelandese come artigliere e poco tempo dopo partecipò alle battaglie di EI Alamein e Monte Cessino. In Once He Was a Gunner è la sua voce a raccontare gli eventi che lo videro protagonista durante la guerra, sino al momento in cui conobbe la propria futura moglie in Italia nell’inverno del 1944, quando molte unità delle forze alleate alloggiavano nelle case dei civili. In Histoires de soldats la sua testimonianza si affianca a quella di John Ewings, fuciliere dell’esercito britannico che nell’agosto del 1914 ebbe la visione di un angelo su un campo di battaglia in Francia durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale, la cui vicenda narrata nel 1980 in un programma radiofonico della BBC costituisce l’asse portante di An Angel at Mons. Storie crude e poetiche al contempo, orchestrate can un equilibrato bilanciamento fra suono sintetizzato e flusso verbale che rende l’intero lavoro una creatura ibrida fra radiodramma, composizione elettroacustica e spoken word. [7.3] L’album Espaces lointains ha invece struttura più tradizionale, spaziando fra una molteplicità di soluzioni che attingano indistintamente da scenari naturali come da ambientazioni urbane. Sweet Anticipation apre il tutto con un insieme di field recardings raccolte a New York in cui i suoni della città si mescolano e si stracana creando un affresco vivace e dinamico. In Arioso, l’ambientazione si sposta nella notte umida di Tappan Square a Oberlin nell’Ohio, can un coro di grilli e il bip elettronico dei segnali di attraversamento pedonale a creare un’atmosfera meditativa che dette la quiete notturna. Hidden Spaces è invece suddiviso in tre sezioni, ciascuna delle quali esplora uno scenario distinto spaziando dal lago Ràfstad in Svezia alle sonorità stridenti di una scala mobile nella stazione della metropolitana di Outremont a Montréal, sino al un parco animali di Altschluderbach costruito attorno al rifugio in cui Gustav Mahler creava le sue composizioni. Paesaggi sonori evocativi, ricchi di inventiva e fascino.