On Rappel, Chris calls every one in the world with the same phone number as him to see if they have anything in common. Practical explorations of intimacy, invasion, the role of ansaphones, the music of the touch tone, public phone boxes and the ease of long distance telecommunications compared to physical travel are made and crafted into sound pieces originally broadcast by a single telephone number for a period of six months (and subsequently on a national radio show).

That Québec has always had a strong tradition in electronic and electro-acoustic music is a given; what continues to surprise is the health, depth and scope of the work being created. The Québec label OHM/AVTR seems interested in exploringsound sources and found sounds. At its core, OHM/AVTR seems to be following the esteemed traditions of people like John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Brion Gysin, and more recently Robin Rimbaud’s project, and Panasonic, in creating musique concrete and sound collages.

Rappel, is about the art of voyeurism. Produced in collaboration with Radio-Canada’s Chant magnétique. Rappel is a coliection of recordings from a little Bell branch office, and from answering machines. Sound experimenters have dropped in on people’s phone conversations, capturing their innocent exchanges with one another. The effect is at once banal and disturbing, catching these transmissions and monitoring them much the same way someone would from security services. In a world of instant communications and yet unprecedented surveillance, Rappel tackles issues of privacy and appropriation, and the lines that are drawn between the private and public self when you try to reach out and touch someone.

Compilation of telephone related sound works by Christof Migone, Daniel Leduc, Sylvia Wang, Algojo)(Algojo, Pierre-André Arcand, Chantal Dumas, Kathy Kennedy, Jean Routhier, Gregory Whitehead and Doyon/Demers. There’s a lot of French-speak here, making me ill-equipped to understand or judge these pieces, but I’ll mention that they tend to remind me of the works by some of these same artists on Nonsequitur’s Radius compilations. Here they dwell on the sounds and mysteries of the telephone world rather than the possibilities of radio art (lots of beeps, busy signal, answering machine messages, etc. ) to pretty interesting effect.