Randall Smith is an electroacoustic composer working in Toronto, Ontario. Sondes’ six tracks spanning four years of composing are condensed into an earjarring seventy-five minutes. Sondes is truly difficult music. Some compositions are for cello and tape while others are composed solely of sampled flute, violin, clarinet, and bass. At times harsh, but never melodic, this music requires a dedicated listener. If you are trying to concentrate on something else while Sondes is playing, forget it! If you like raucous, harsh, avant-garde music, Sondes is for you.

“Bruit” is French for noise, noise that is innocuous, bothersome, undesirable, and pointless. Marc Tremblay is a French Canadian electroacoustic composer who explores six interpretations of these aspects of noise on this album. The opening composition Vroum is an aural exploration of the automobile using samples of The Beatles (Beep beep mmm beep beep, yeah), car horns, car doors, starting engines, driving cars, etc. These are those mundane sounds we hear everyday brought into a new focus. The second composition Conte sous la lune is intended as an homage to childhood. It is a quiet piece with tinkling chimes, fluttering electronics, and infants laughing and bathing all sampled and processed. The third piece Résidus (clip dadaïste) can be quite revolting to some listeners. Tremblay plays with the sounds we hear in a bathroom: flushing, belching, farting, vomiting, washing, etc. and a bit more out there than Roger Waters’ Body Music. Résidus (clip dadaïste) builds to a toilet flush of major proportions, probably not something you want to have playing as dinner music. The fourth composition is Cowboy Fiction where Tremblay samples the soundtracks from the French version of Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, John Ford’s The Searchers, a cover of Hank Williams’ Rambling Man, locomotives, and guns. This is an ingenious blend of these sources that results in a dream-like vision of Hollywood Westerns with the White Man (John Wayne) taking the land by force from the Indian. The fifth composition is «… Ceci est un message enregistré…», a sexy little number exploring the sonic realm of the telephone: ringing, hidden defects, dead-air moments, anonymous voices, and its decadent use for phone sex. The disc closes with L’argent, toujours l’argent…. This piece is a study of money as sound material and is more ambient/cosmic in nature than the other pieces. Bruit-graffiti is the perfect addition to your sound collage library.

Louis Dufort composes for the Marie Chouinard contemporary dance company, works with the artistic committee of ACREQ, and explores hybrid and unbridled musical experimentation. Connexion is his first release of electroacoustic music and contains four compositions: Transit (1998), Pointe-aux-Trembles (1996), Zénith (1999), and Décap (2000).

Spanning 4 years of musical explorations, each piece is unique. Transit is an abstract composition that jumps around from metallic alarm clock-like bells, descending whines, processed noise, and wordless vocals. At times it sounds like it could be destroying your speakers. The liner notes state that Transit is “a work that makes use of continuous discontinuity.” Pointe-aux-Trembles is a quiet piece comprised of high frequency sounds and is an impression of the refineries at Eastern Montréal’s. Zénith, as the name implies, is a Ligeti styled composition that slowly builds to a loud climax culminating with demonic mutterings. The final composition, Décap, is Dufort’s study of wrists and ankles and is for the Marie Chouinard dance troupe. It is quite impressive and I could swear that I heard samples from The Beatles’ Revolution 9 and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (the studio album). If not sampled [Dufort says it is not], then Dufort duplicated some of the studio tricks used 30 years ago on these albums.

On this CD [Figures] there are 4 compositions, each last between 11 or 19 minutes. The first track is called Le renard et la rose (1995) — “The fox and the rose” in English — is composed with sounds that comes from a track used for a radio-play of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and voices of the actors at this play. Robert Normandeau uses the sounds to create an ambient drone atmosphere where some sounds are rhythmical used by means of repetition, echo and reverberation. Sometimes the atmosphere is slow while where repetition is used the tempo goes up.

Figures de rhétorique (1997) is the second composition and starts with a contemporary piano play (Jacques Drouin) where slowly some soft metallic ticking sounds are added, both interact slowly while to the end they really start a fast and more disturbing interaction.

The third track Venture (1998) is again an atmospheric composition with several moods wave sounds comes slowly up and disappear faster followed with an ambient atmosphere. There are moments of tranquil atmospheres while a few seconds later there is a drone mood. With the atmosphere he creates in this composition, he wants to reach six movements: innocence, stability, tension, frenzy, violence and serenity. Something that succeeds him very well because as in the six movements there are moments of a true war between the sounds but followed with peace.

The final composition Ellipse (1999) the sounds used in this composition are warm as it are string and wood sounds. It is a composition of contemporary classical music made with guitar. The guitar is not used to play on in an academic way but string and wood sounds are created by using in a non-conform way. These sounds are recorded and mixed in multiple so that a warm contemporary classical play is created.

Bells subsume into drainage systems and there is something quixotic about the cutting-up of water. And is identifying sounds winning out over listening to them? A taste of honey and a swirl of flies? Now shivering and wobbling, with an unidentified lowing beside. The cut-up review? No, as it coincides with the lowing laugh — that would be banal. Voices of children are trumped by more wobbling. Thumped? It could be read as such. Coo-koo. Applause. Is alchemy’s transmutation nothing less than an exchange of ideas? Something from nothing…

Telephone message — communications. Tones — questions. Voices — attention. Musique concrète — it is unclear.

À force de concevoir des remèdes efficaces dans le traitement de pathologies radiovisuelles aiguës, le label empreintes DIGITALes pourrait bien devenir un des fournisseurs officiels de notre acousmodrome solénoïdal. Dans la nuée de nouveautés que vient d’essaimer le label canadien, se distingue l’album de l’anglais Adrian Moore. Une œuvre concrète, versatile et complexe qui se découpe en trois parties: l’une est dédiée à l’abstraction sonore, l’autre au retraitement de sons naturels d’objets domestiques et la dernière est à connotation «radiogénique» selon les termes de l’artiste. Transformés en véritables capteurs de sons cachés ou insinués, ce sont les microphones qui sont ici à l’honneur. Naviguant entre évocations insolites ou oniriques et digressions autoparodiques, l’auditeur devient le témoin émerveillé d’une exploration chirurgicale et émotionnelle au cœur de la texture sonore…