electrocd

Review

George Zahora, Splendid E-Zine, August 10, 1998

Christian Calon is a founding member of the CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), so the canny listener immediately knows not to expect an album of traditional three-minute pop songs… or, indeed, an album of any kind of songs. What you’ll encounter instead is a landscape of shimmering, volatile polyphony. Portrait d’un visiteur, for instance, melds brief sonic motion-textures — analog found-sound and synthesized instrumentation — to show how the familiar can become unfamiliar. La disparition, if I’ve understood it correctly, collects sound-fragments from a multi-cultural array of works, assembles and categorizes them and then reassembles them in ways that highlight the fundamental connections and similarities between the disparate musical traditions. Minuit, the last composition, is a sort of exploration of a sonic dreamtime, combining the emotional climax of dream-thought patterns and the interplay of music and text. As with most empreintes DIGITALes releases, this is a challenging work that’s far more involved than an uninformed listen might suggest; reading the CD booklet provides essential contextual information that gives the pieces meaning.

… a landscape of shimmering, volatile polyphony.