Zoo is a must-have CD. Talking to a Loudspeaker, a piece originally part of the New American Radio Series, was one of the first pieces to make me think about sound, text, and communication. It is an amusing an intelligent run through ideas of radio and communication, broken down in to short, easy-to-digest pieces. For example [The News], there is an exercise in radio news, which presents two sides of an abortion protest, the political right positioned in the right speaker, and the political left in the left speaker, allowing the listener to adjust the balance. Destroy: Information Only is an experimental documentary of Lander’s problems with a back injury. It’s a frightful but beautifully executed piece. Failed Suicide is the shortest and oddest piece, in which unidentified voices depict, in a very strange manner, a suicide. The last track, City Zoo / Zoo City, is a piece of digitally manipulated field recordings of a zoo, reinventing the animals as anything but animals. A very smart CD.

The 40-year-old Stéphane Roy brings a background in literature to his work in electroacoustic music. This Montréal-based composer has received numerous awards for his music. The composer associates his style with the school of “acousmatic” composition of the GRM in Paris.

Kaleidos brings together four compositions composed over the period 1987-1994. Mr. Roy’s sonic palette is consistent throughout this collection. In sudden gestures, he scatters fleeting sprays ot oily resonant grains. These are often mixed on top of distant, amorphous textures. Stéphane Roy also relies on another strategy: wide variations in dynamic range. Violent outbursts of energy emerge dramatically from near-silence to make curious gestures, then quickly disappear.

Mimetismo (1992) is a virtuoso composition based on strumming in the style of Spanish flamenco guitar, spanning 10 min and 36 sec. The piece was realized in several stages, with initial work using the SYTER system at the GRM studios, and final editing at the studios of the Universite de Montréal. The piece hegins gradually, building frenetically to an extended summit (but not a climax) at 3:30. The intensity gradually lowers, and we are transported to a realm of distant atmospheres. I was impressed by the composer’s fluid treatment of macro form.

Paysages intérieurs (1988), realized at the Universite de Montréal studios, works with a limited palette of source sounds that are transformed in the manner of musique concrète: filtered, transposed, remixed, spliced. The first several minutes consist of variations in what sound like small bells. The opposition between distant, Iooming figures and nervous cross-panning grains creates a dramatic landscape. As the composer states: “In these landscapes, where the unspoken reigns, a thousand fears suddenly emerge under the pressure of an interior murmur. The mysteries of our spirit open up ancient fratricidal debates, nourished by our entire existence” (program notes). This is a mysterious yet intriguing work, continuous in texture with a beautiful low-layer weaving throughout.

Ondes / Arborescences (1987), created in Montréal a year before Paysages intérieurs, Iasts 9 min and 36 sec. It begins with a cascade ot high and low frequencies. The source of its watery timbres is untraceable. Pitch plays more of a role in the opening of this work, which adds layers of long sustained tones to create harmonic fields that eventually destadestabilize into noises. The (analog synthesizer?) pitches return, drifting down in amplitude and across the spatial panorama. The melodic material seems improvised and quasi-random, so although the piece is skillfuily mixed, I did not find this piece to be as strong as the others.

Crystal Music (1994), at 14 min and 46 sec, is the newest and longest work on this disc. The work unfolds in the same unstable style as Mimetismo Realized with the Common Lisp music language, the first minute opens in a dramatic “acousmatic” style. As the composer states: “Like glasswork, the material has been expanded, moulded, transmuted in the fiery furnaces of experimentation.” A wide range of dynamics and techniques of granulation plays a major role in this tour-de-force of mixing.

Autour is the name of Schryer’s release. First presented is a seven-movement Sound Odyssey [Musique de l’Odyssée sonore] which is a vicarious journey decorated with hooves, horns and bells. Called a “radiophonic sound walk” El medio ambiente acústico de México begins with a gunshot and ends with quiet footsteps and birds. It brings together a great collection of visual, recognizable sounds, Schryer’s work will strike the listener as the most disturbing or intriguing of recent [empreintes DIGITALes’] DIFFUSION i MéDIA releases…

Two composers you [will] not find on Miniatures concrètes are Christian Calon and Claude Schryer, but they both have recent releases on the label.

Calon’s work Les corps éblouis is presented on a CD EP (22:45) of the same name. It seems an artists study in string tension. Sounds leap out of silence as an electrical guitar is used to in every conceivable way short of strumming. The results are further treated, for a final effect that is alien and complete.

A friend once looked through my CD collection and asked ‘what sort of songs’ were on a certain [empreintes DIGITALes’] DIFFUSION i MéDIA release. “Well, it is more a collection of sounds than songs” I offered. [empreintes DIGITALes’] DIFFUSION i MéDIA put out exquisitely recorded collection of musique concrète and other avant forms of experimentation. A few releases are slimline packaged, but most are in handsome cardboard packaging with thick booklets (text in French and English) and attractively cuts sleeves for the disc itself.

An excellent introduction to their vast catalogue is the compilation Miniatures concrètes. Blips, environmental sounds and strange loops flit across the stereo range on this recording. It is best to climb right it and experience this strange world through a pair of headphones. Two dozen short works from a many composers are presented here. This also marks the fiftieth anniversary of musique concrète, the French name for the creative sequencing of tape recorded music and natural sounds. A thirty-two page booklet offers text on every track.

The most modern of the three is the [Canadian based-] Breton-Algerian studio composer Ned Bouhalassa, who goes out to search for inspiration in the street whenever he’s fed up with the studio. On Aérosol he is inspired by street-life, film, science fiction, graffiti and even techno music. Bouffée délirante (1990) is Bouhalassa’s first attempt to make “cinema for the ear.” Attraction is Ned’s nihilistic credo. Magnetic fluxes attract or repel each other. Constamment (autoportrait) is an [electro]acoustic self-portrait in five parts illustrating five phases in the life of the composer.

empreintes DIGITALes shows with these three new albums that electroacoustic music is constantly in flux and cannot be narrowed into an academic corner. [English translation: Jean-François Delannoy and Berry de Bruijn]