electrocd

Reviews

Nathan Turk, Signal to Noise, no. 34, June 1, 2004

Attendees of the May 17, 2003 presentation that yielded Tout le monde en place pour un set américain — part of the annual Festival International de Musique Actuelle in the remote Quebec town of Victoriaville — were encouraged to wander around the performers’ stage, which lay in the room’s center with ten loudspeakers surrounding the seats. But even detached from this interactive spatial element, the sound collages of Carole Rieussec and Jean-Christophe Camps (appearing as the duo Kristoff K.Roll), Xavier Charles, Diane Labrosse and Martin Tétreault still captivate. Tous, the first of the disc’s two extended pieces, ruminates over a motive of sinister speaker crackle with metallic scree, the clomping of wood and random blurts from Tétreault’s “dismembered turntables”, which he utilizes both with and without LPs. Samples of children splashing in water eerily juxtapose at one point with rattlesnake percussion, septic bass tones and screams of feedback, while later a sickly harmony sets in among sounds of buzzing conduits and a prepared violin. En place has a similar feel but recasts the first piece’s building blocks — Camps’ and Rieussec’s found-object chatter, Labrosse’s “electric eye” machine (similar to a theremin) and Charles’ ghostly clarinet phrases — in new timbrel contexts. The sonic tapestries of PSI or Martin Archer are a fair reference point for what results, though Tout le monde en place pour un set américain teems with unusual vitality. The ending of En place, for example, winds down like a weather front circa 2340 A.D., with the calm static of a dying amp and subliminal humming returning the disc’s sound storm to rest, just as it began.

… unusual vitality.