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]

This is an interesting proposition, which can also be applied to the fine 22-minute composition Les corps éblouis by Christian Calon. The challenge for him was to create a piece based on metamorphoses. He uses as the single source an electric guitar, transformed to the point of being unrecognizable, which spirals its way up the auditory tract.

Electroacoustic music is best experienced in a quiet room where faint sounds from the outside world seep in. Auditive perceptions thus get double layered. The splatter of a real rain shower mingles with the virtual reality flowing out of the loudspeakers. Child voices in the street get entangled with voice samples which fill the space.

Rendu visible is the most recent CD by bruitist [sound-artist] Darren Copeland. The three titles of the album (Rendered visible, Reaching for Tomorrow, Night Camera) refer explicitly to visual impressions. In his compositions, Copeland uses sounds from the real world to stimulate the listener’s latent visual representations. This is best illustrated in Night Camera, where three soundscapes equip the auditive imagination with a magical lens to create invisible worlds. It is interesting that sounds picked from the real world have a more direct impact on visual imagination than on the auditive. Copeland goes even further: what are the sensations of someone who cannot make visual comparisons, that is, who was born blind? Rendu visible is an auditive experience like a peephole to the actual world.

Het akoesmatische Kaleidos van Stéphane Roy is minder toegankelijk. Roy speelt met klanken en geluiden zoals een schilder met verf en kleurnuances. Als pointilisme in de muziek bestaat dan is Kaleidos daar een perfect voorbeeld van. De spaarzame tonen verspreiden zich op het eerste gehoor achteloos in alle richtingen als kleuren in een kaleidoscoop. Toch is dit een meticuleus en perfectionistisch samengesteld klankenpalet dat zijn volle rijkdom toont in Mimetismo, waar hij in de clinch gaat met de Spaanse, akoestische gitaar van Arturo Parra, en in het betoverende en kristalheldere Crystal Music.