Musicien québécois travaillant depuis des années autour de l’art contemporain (danse et installations), Robert Normandeau offre, avec ce volume récapitulatif, un panoramique de ses expériences électroacoustiques et électroniques en un superbe travail de mise en espace du son et de ses variations. Aujourd’hui, séduit par les sirènes techno, on le retrouve aussi sur label Rephlex d’Aphex Twin pour des compositions plus punchy. À suivre…

Since Daoust’s official entry into the professional world of music in 1978, he has composed an average of one work per year, in various genres, for diverse occasions, and ensembles including film and stage soundtracks, multi-disciplinary performances and concert works. He was awarded the Euphonie d’Or prize (Bourges 1993) for his work Quatuor (Anecdotes IMED 9106) consecrated as a “classic” in electroacoustic music. Bruits is a third recording by Yves Daoust on empreintes DIGITALes (Anecdotes 1991; Musiques naïves 1998). 4 works, 4 commissions; from Québec organizations as well as French and British organizations. The title work is a postcard, a sonic portrait of a landscape dear to Daoust: Montréal. You will be introduced to the children of the city, its nights and festivities. Daoust chose to be a witness of an environment in La gamme as well. Bruits is a most interesting release, an opportunity to dig deeper into the creative realms of one of Québec’s most important electroacoustic composer.

Gilles Gobeil invites us to his haunting imaginary world. 4 works takes us on an unbelievable dream (or is it a nightmare?). True to his style, Gobeil’s music is rich with evocative moods. It’s a continuous sonic thriller. Beware, we certainly don’t know where this music will take us. Projet Proust, Point de Passage, and Nuit cendre were all inspired by Gobeil’s readings (Proust, HG Wells, and Jules Verne). Derrière la porte la plus éloignée… will show you Venice like you’ve never seen it before. All aboard with Gilles Gobeil on a trip you won’t forget!

Having produced several instrumental and mixed works, his current endeavors are focused on acousmatic music. More specifically, his compositions employ æsthetic criteria whereby he creates a “cinema for the ear” in which ‘meaning’ as well as ‘sound’ become elements which elaborate his works. Along with concert music he now writes incidental music, especially for the theater. His works are performed and broadcast around the world and have received prizes and mentions in numerous competitions. “Earthlight. One of the strongest images of the achievements we witnessed during the 20th century. These pictures of the earth taken from space will forever stay in our minds.” Normandeau’s Clair de terre is build up with a cinematic structure as the titles of each movement reveals. The two other titles introduces us to Normandeau’s world when he composes for the stage (theater). They are made up of sonic elements he used for music composed for the stage. This is Robert Normandeau’s fourth release on empreintes DIGITALes.

Denis Smalley is an electroacoustic composer from New Zealand who has spent a year in Olivier Messiaen’s composition class at the Conservatoire de Paris and is currently the Head of the Music Department at the City University of London. Smalley has received a number of international awards for his work over the past 25 years. The music on this CD is a collection of four pieces from his long career. Base Metals, Empty Vessels, and Tides are the realization of the idea that a principal sound source can be the provider of the central material. In Base Metals the source was metallic sound sculptures created by the artist Derek Shiel. The result is an ambient sonic journey through the cosmos. The sound sources for Empty Vessels are large garden pots from Crete and an olive jar from Turkey. This piece incorporates many other elements (birds, airplanes thunder, and rain) and is akin to Lustmords Where the Black Stars Hang. The sonic images of Tides are based on the analogies between water and sound. In the first movement Pools and Currents, digital scraping, bubbling, and squelching sounds surge with the ebb and flow of the tides. The second movement, Sea Flight, uses crashing waves of sound. The final piece, Pentes, brings into play loud bursts of sound, chugging rhythms, slow crescendos of chords, and small alien critters to achieve the sonic equivalent of slopes and inclines. All in all, an interesting release that is fairly accessible for this genre.

Jonty Harrison is another British electroacoustic composer and his CD may be the most accessible of three recent DiM [empreintes DIGITALes] releases (Sources/scènes, Traces, and Évidence matérielle). This CD contains five compositions spanning the past ten years. The first piece, Klang, uses the sounds of two earthenware casseroles to which Jonty adds the ingredients of cow-bells, metal rods, and aluminum bars to prepare an eerie meal of reverberating tones. Sorties is about fleeing an interior space for an exterior one, only to find that you are mysteriously trapped in a much larger interior space, like being inside one of those Russian dolls. The sonic sources are recognizable (cars, trucks, trains, walking shoes, children at play) and only add to the dark and brooding atmosphere of the composition. Surface Tension is constructed literally from the dry brittle sounds of packing material (Styrofoam and cardboard) that, after processing, have a somewhat organic texture as the material is put under greater and greater stress. Shifting now to wood and its varied sounds as it is twisted, tapped, burned, and otherwise strained is the subject matter for Splintering. Clocking in at almost 20 minutes, it might be overlong. The final piece is Streams with the obvious water reference. Water can be so melodic and Jonty wrings out all of its nuances in Streams. If you are interested in cutting-edge electroacoustic music, check out the DiM [empreintes DIGITALes] label and, especially, Jonty Harrison.