The festival Akousma 9, October 24 to 27, 2012 at Usine C in Montréal (Québec), presents 8 concerts featuring, amongst others, Manuella Blackburn, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Mathew Adkins.

Elizabeth Hoffmann who works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, releases her first solo album for Montréal-based Empreintes DIGITALes. The album totals six tracks exploring the shades and possibilities of electroacoustic music. Personally I’ve always been more interested in the final and audible result rather than the process behind creating the music. That being said, Hoffmann manages to captivate six different moods on the album starting off with the gentle chime ringing, organic and battering murky drums but yet still dead clinically sterile and icey environment of Resonants, onto the subtle and elongated modulations of rippling water present on Water Spirits. Songstressed shares much of the same audible qualities as Resonant but introduces a shrilling pipe sound, which in nature appears to be recorded in a sardonic wind tunnel, inhabited by abhorrent creatures. Songstressed transforms into d-ness which is a symphony of spiralling high-pitched sounds, shrouding the composition in a mulitude of layers. Towards the end of the album Soundendipities reveals a vortex of eeire malevolence and as the tracks proceeds in its development, the mood turns from eerie into a ominously clangorous orchestration of which Pascal Laugier would be proud. Out now on Empreintes Digitales.

Elektramusic is presenting a concert of acousmatic and videomusic works by Mathew Adkins, Hans Tutschku, Dominique Bassal, and others on Octobre 25, 2012 at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg (France).

Après la fresque politique, les carnets de voyage et le portrait, le duo d’explorateurs électroacoustiques Kristoff K.Roll propose avec À l’ombre des ondes une expérience très insolite au travers de trois «siestes audio-parlantes», à savourer en position de dormeur éveillé.

Dans À l’ombre des ondes, disque scindé en trois fragments et fondé sur la mise en son(s) de récits de rêves, Kristoff K.Roll incise les parts d’un intime universel. En invitant l’auditeur à se placer en position de «siesteur», casque sur les oreilles, le duo formé par J-Kristoff Camps et Carole Rieussec souligne la nécessité de s’approcher — aussi bien physiquement que mentalement — le plus possible d’un état prédisposant au songe, proche de la semi-conscience, afin de capter au mieux ces sons «que l’on entend sans en déceler visuellement la cause».

Œuvre de musiciens-conteurs modernes, ce «cinéma pour l’oreille» se décline à la façon d’un documentaire poétique, ouvrant directement sur l’inconscient. Individuelle avec le disque, l’expérience particulière de l’écoute se vit collectivement en concert: 80 personnes allongées, reliées par câbles audio. Les deux artistes, improvisant avec sons et rumeurs environnants, construisent la toile des rêves du public. Les suspensions de la parole laissent l’auditeur prendre le temps de l’espace. L’écoute au casque permet de vivre un moment privilégié face à soi, temps suspendu, déambulation introspective hors du quotidien.

Le fil narratif du souvenir est un processus complexe et les textures sonores lui insufflent toutes ses dimensions. Oscillations, variations de vitesse, filtres, étagements, éclatement des images, spatialisation: la dramaturgie, précise, offre un riche contrepoint aux récits. Bruissements végétaux, résonances minérales, sons urbains… La musique rythme, court-circuite, étire. Les deux arpenteurs confèrent une nouvelle topographie aux reliefs et paysages mouvants, labyrinthe sonore dans lequel se perd la langue. Les témoignages ont le temps de se déployer et de se dissoudre dans les sons pour laisser libre cours à notre faculté de réinvention et agir, comme un charme, sur notre imaginaire.

CD de la semaine en partenariat avec La Gaîté Lyrique.

After a first weekend of concerts in Valparaíso (Chile) on October 6 and 7, 2012 and a second in Santiago, on October 12 to 14, the 12th Festival Internacional de Música Electroacústica de Chile, Ai-maako 202, is going to Valdivia on October 18 to 20 where it will end. This year the festival is featuring Åke Parmerud, Daniel Osorio, Denis Dufour, Jean-François Denis, and Gabriel Brnčić.

Even if Intérieurs harmoniques is officially her debut album, it’s quite clear since the first seconds of listening that NYC-based composer Elizabeth Hoffman is not a callow improviser and the fact her solo-release comes out on Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes, one of the most appreciated in the field of electroacoustics and acousmatics by many demanding followers of the genre, is fairly meaningful.

Once the listener can easily ascertain her skillfulness in modelling mainly percussive sounds, related to her passion for electroacoustics, which has been accrued over many years of academic background, the most remarkable aspect of Elizabeth’s sound maybe lies in the fey facets of her visionary (lasting about ten minutes each) sound collages. Listener’s imagination immediately meets its match in the intial (and most recently recorded) track Resonants, where the seducing texture of bells, glockenspiel and cymbals seems to echo back listener’s phosphenes after closing eyes and the following movement could be associated to a fictitious pebble nearby the rail in the act of listening the coming, the arrival and the departure of a train in the subway. This imaginary ear-transplant or cochlear implant into a molecular entity could be imagined while listening to Water Spirits — listeners could easily think about the vicissitudes of a water particle since the moment it arrives on earth from a storm cloud, which travels across conduits, sewer pipes, sinks, entrails and viscera afterwards — and Songstressed — its listening could let you think about microphones on a particle of dust which during its mishaps falls into a bird’s syrinx! Similarly fictional microscopic journey could be inspired by remaining tracks: Allamuchy reminded the initial track of Autistici’s Beneath Peaks I recently reviewed due to the recordings of different moments (including a nap), which have supposedly been recorded in the natural set of Allamuchy wood in New Jersey, while d-ness sounds like the sonic translation of some emotional set which couldn’t be explained but through sounds. The effected squeaks and every tessereas of the sonic mosaic of the final Soundendipities, which costantly sounds on the edge of a cliff, closes this interesting listening experience with a sinister note of acousmatic self-irony indeed!