Quando si entra in territorio acusmatico la percezione cambia, è d’obbligo. Il suono viene ripartito tra vari altoparlanti e richiede l’immersione totale nella sua stessa materia per essere recepito. Il sound artist passa in secondo piano, pur essendo l’esecutore e il creatore della partitura, si pone in ombra rispetto al suono che trasmette. Cerimonie che forniscono elementi di incredibile spazialità, in special modo se l’offerta riguarda i micro-cosmi elettroacustici e la loro rappresentazione attraverso l’improvvisazione, la specialità della compositrice, sound artist e ricercatrice canadese Ana Dall’Ara-Majek. Contemporaneità Immersiva.

There’s a track on SoundCloud that periodically goes viral on social media, accompanied by the usual expressions of astonishment and high emotion that that medium demands. It sounds like a heavenly choir singing in perfect diatonic harmony, but the accompanying blurb claims it as no more than a recording of massed crickets slowed down in extremis.

It’s not, of course. Or at least, not without significantly more manipulation than that implies. But the popular hoax finds an uncanny echo in the first track on composer Ana Dall’Ara-Majek’s new album on Québécois label empreintes DIGITALes.

The title track Akheta’s Blues refers to the cyclical song of the Acheta domesticus, that is the common house cricket. And though Akheta’s Blues offers significantly more melodic and rhythmic sophistication thans its online predecessor, all skittering rhythms and unearthly howls, sudden bursts and implacable rustles, it is nonetheless a piece of tonal electroacoustic music, its variant layers related harmonically and arranged according to melodic leitmotifs. The approach is typical of Ana Dall’Ara-Majek, a Paris born composer with a PhD from the University of Montréal and a particular interest in electroacoustic analysis. The track works through precise, granular detail to discover the music hidden in things, to eke it out and elaborate it compositionally.

All the tracks on Nano-Cosmos are inspired by, extracted from, or somehow dedicated to the indra-world of creepy crawlies and micro-organisms. Diaphanous Acarina takes you into the society of mites that live on vine leaves as seen through a microscope. Bacillus Chorus, as the name suggests, os a chorus of bacteria, developed with the RSF Kobol synthesizer and structured according to processes of binary fission and incessant contamination. Pixel Springtail Promenade evokes arthropods as small as computer pixels. Xylocopa Ransbecka goes in search of an errant carpenter bee from the macro world of human-audible field recordings to a micro world of glitches and electrical swirls.

The album collects works composed since 2012 in a wide variety of formats — in some cases reducing a 16-channel surround set-up down to a stereo mix. But in no case does that reduction inhibit the listener’s sense of entering into a universe quite distinct, both familiar and inscrutable, everyday and utterly alien.

Here we have a composer from Montréal, where she got a doctorate in composition at the University in [2016]. Besides working with others in composing and performer, Ana Dall’Ara-Majek organises computer music programs and has a duo with Ida Toninato called Jane/KIN. “Nano-Cosmos is a cycle of acousmatic pieces dedicated to insects, small arthropods and microorganisms”, it says on the cover. There are five pieces on this release, usually created for a multi-speaker set-up, but here traveling from two speakers to your ears. The microscopic look at insects, bacteria and other hardly visible creatures lies at the basis of the music, which in all five pieces seem to consist of lots of small sounds. Sometimes these are heavily clustered together, thus from some drone like pattern (or two), but the can also appear like a swarm, all appearing seemingly random and chaotic, although they probably are not. It seems as if some of these sounds are voice like, almost singing, like in Bacillus Chorus, but surely the title of that piece was perhaps leading me on. Dall’Ara-Majek doesn’t seem to be using all these granular processes that sound like slides, going up and down that some of the composers who record for this label are known for, but throughout she seeks an extremer sound, with deep bass bumps and high end hiss, such as in Pixel Springtail Promenade, yet she also never betrays her roots in serious electronic music. She uses quite a bit of field recordings, although not always recognizable as from the land of microcosmos. In the final piece, Xylocopa Ransbecka one recognizes the sounds of wood doors; in the text she explains how sees that relation and yes, that works well. Also within the context of the whole CD it works pretty well. Throughout a most enjoyable, me thinks.