Sonus.ca is a permanent searchable web jukebox of hundreds of pieces by composers from around the world. The CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), presents this permanent and ever-expanding on-line electroacoustic repertoire, complete with programme notes and short composer biographies, freely accessible to the public. This collection offers a permanent database of sounds and pieces, which the international education and research community in music/sound perception can access freely.

Alain Thibault, featured on Volt, composed the original soundtrack of Paul-André Fortier’s choreography, “Risque.”

Martin Tétreault will take part to the 10th Guelph Jazz Festival, with Jesse Stewart, Sunday September 7, 2003.

By now the name Tomas Jirku is a well respected one in the field of minimal dance music. His previous 12”s have a strong dance floor sensibility and his concerts are hilarious. His CDs so far showed a more austere side of his work, more intended for home listening. They too use rhythms to quite an extended but are more minimal, working more indepth on sound and colour. Yet, with his new album Bleak 1999 he goes a bit further. The rhythms found here are not just ‘acid’ or ‘techno’ rhythms, but very straight forward bangs with little to none variation. Each of the sixteen tracks here have some sort of rhythm, but they merely carry the piece. The icing on each cake comes from a likewise sober use of synthesized sounds and processed radio transmissions. A somewhat distant, yet quite atmospheric sound is displayed here. Music that seems to be intended to be played at that point of the day when day turns into night: shimmering twilight music, with the lights just turned on, driving by an abandonned industrial site. Maybe a black and white movie, rather then a coloured one. It should be a bit cloudy during that day. Tracks flow into each other here, thus to emphasize the drive by nature of the music. Music that is made in solitude and should be listened in soltitude. Maybe it’s a far cry from Jirku’s partymode, but at least it’s also something to show that he is not a flat character. I guess it’s an album that will upset some of his listeners, but more of the same is always less. To the reasons why it took so long to release it (the title indicates rightly that it was recorded in 1999), I can only guess, but it’s good to see it out, at last.

In a short time span, this is the third release by Books on Tape (see also Vital Weekly 361 and 376), the solo project of Todd Drootin, who once more takes his punk attitude to the sampler and cooks up a nice meal of hip hop, punk and techno. Whereas the recent 10” was maybe a bit long, the balance here is right. The sixteen tracks are one long driving energy force of energetic pieces that breath the speed of punk, but takes it’s sampled sources from anywhere in history of music — jazz, blues, techno — but without sounding like that at all. Despite the title, Books on Tape may sing a lot of tunes, but definetely not the blues. Maybe it’s a more raw version of Moby at times. Freshly aggressive, raw and untamed. Quite an enjoyable effort.

I must admit I feared the worst, when I read the press blurb raving about ‘a wide range of chaotic sounds together into one sweeping smorgasbord of interpretations of disease and dysfunction’. It’s not that I dislike noise, even when it took me four years to hear all fifty Merzbow CDs that are in the Merzbox. Occassionally I even play a Whitehouse record, MB or Ramleh. But much of the noise music that is made by others are just a repetition of archetypes put forward by those I just mentioned and do not add something new. So when I got through this lengthy compilation of no-less then thirty-three tracks by as many artists, I can safely say: noise music is alive and maybe even kicking (despite it’s disease?). It has become an umbrella for many sub-genres, feedback inspired noise, guitar noise, dark ambient, plunderphonics and in some cases even techno oriented. Quite a pleasent trip. Not to mention the many unknown bands here, like Bomb20, Burmese, Iran, Persona, Mixel Pixel, Spin Laden, Cussycat, Berkowitz Lake & Dahmer (yes, some of these people have nice band names too) or Travis Bickle’s Mohawk. Prime noise makers — that is people who have gained a following already of their own — include Illusion Of Safety, V/VM, Zipperspy or The Evolution Control Committee. It’s the variety of music that makes it quite enjoyable. Short tracks, from various angles of noise (and related — he hastened to say) make this quite a vivid compilation.