In this tastefully packaged DVD-Audio recording, electroacoustic composer (and former Francis Dhomont protégé) Monique Jean (re)asserts her redoubtable talent in a field scarcely short of it. Her second release on the empreintes DIGITALes label – in 9 years to be precise – demonstrates a depth of realisation most likely achieved as a result of a patient, methodical work ethic. Unlikely is it that she’s been sat around thinking about lunch all these years: her list of works for live performance, radio, video and installations, since 1997, is Babylonian in stature. Regarding the work itself: in the words of a biographer, Jean ‘is interested in the tensions, ruptures and clashes of sonic matter that produce a transmutation of the real into the poetic.’ Which is as valid a summary of the contents of this DVD-Audio as one could possibly muster.

The slightly sycophantic sleeve notes twice designate the composer a ‘siren’ (though not ‘a goddess’, phew); moving on to conceptually clarify the kinesthetics of solo instrumental performance qua source material for Jean, relating a methodology whereby ‘each performer’s gesture… is magnified and broken down to its energetic principles, which then become the theme of the piece.’ And where for some this might entail sampling and looping telling fragments of a recording for the sake of a tasty beat, for Jean it is an intuitive reckoning with the musician’s very élan vital, as she disembowels a series of intrepid improvisations and exposes the pulsating innards. While Iancu Dumitrescu isn’t likely to find himself on the dole any time soon, he would have every cause to approve of this assiduously assembled set of acousmatic meditations.

While the album’s title Greffes (‘Grafts’, 2012) alludes to realms botanical, I concur with (sleeve note writer) Sharon Kanach’s ‘amniotic’ designation, for there is palpable depth to her world. Subtle aquatic allusions / illusions emerge from the get-go: alien technology stealthily scanning the primordial sea floor in Givre (2011), begetting an unearthly counterpart to Parmegiani’s La création du monde; while simultaneously inhabiting a measureless void – space both inner and outer – a blackness sliced by shafts of light, devoid of emotion or intellect; over 17 minutes accreting electromagnetic mass in the face of the inexorable final moment. Something of a centrepiece to the album, this piece might benefit frequenters of flotation tanks more than the usual phalanx of reverbed panpipes and didgeridoos.

In Ricochets (2006), a soaring saxophone shrieks, wails, wavers and vomits its guts into the alchemist’s laboratory, where it is both dissected and disintegrated on a bed of silence which becomes a funeral pyre: the incandescence of the performance immolating the improviser, who issues upwards in a pungent plume of smoke. Within this, identity remains intact if intangible; conveyed in millions of glistening particles that flow freely from the expanding flames, rattling and retreating from the speakers in intervals.

Similar phenomena beset subsequent performances; differences determined by participants’ personalities. These are also electronically processed, abstracted and distilled. Misfit (2007) sees a tightly tuned guitar given the Catholic heat treatment: the rising and abating conflagration discharging the essence of the once-electric instrument into the heavens. Its strings become livid tendrils that lash through the dense smoke, leaving bloody trails. In low memory #3 (2005) and #1 (2000) there is a distinct alternation / altercation between extended bouts of atmospheric compression and decompression, ‘attempts at re-establishing some kind of balance… the act of rebuilding being constantly thwarted and repeated’; clarinets of different pitches are manipulated and molested with religious fervour and scientific rigour, as though concealing a cosmic secret from the inquisition.

There is violence apparent in these audio autopsies, though it is as implied in the recorded performance as it is, applied by the curious composer. The result is an agonising catharsis, whereby the transpersonal essence is alchemically separated from the ‘corpse’ of the recording and given freedom of speech, within the full emancipatory remit of the recorded medium. It’s a real room-rumbler to boot. Jean’s concerts have won her acclaim in Canada (she took home the 2005 Opus Award for Concert of the Year), which suggests her performances must be something approaching transcendental, if this sublime, surround-sound extravaganza serves as an indication of her prowess. In rare instances such as this recording, a voice speaks to me from an alien dimension, whereupon I experience a gut-level glimmering of fear and wonder. For those who regard the recorded medium as a tomb for ‘dead’ performances, this album might revive a few spirits. Seek it out forthwith!

Sin dagli anni sessanta la sperimentazione sonora legata alla musique concrète si è rivelata uno spazio congeniale alla sensibilità femminile e il numero delle compositrici che oggi operano in quest’ambito appare sempre più numeroso, come testimoniano le recenti uscite di una delle etichette più rappresentative nel settore, la empreintes DIGITALes. Monique Jean, canadese classe 1960, attiva da tempo nell’ambito della musica per film e della sound art, in Greffes anima un mondo magico che è già perfettamente definito dall’acusmarìca pura di Givre, la lunga composizione iniziale creata per dodici performance site-specific del coreografo Tedi Tafel sul ciclo delle stagioni, un’evocativa rappresentazione del risveglio della ntura nel mese di Marzo in cui l’energia vitale inizia ad animarsi Sotto la coltre dei ghiacci. Ad essa si affiancano tre brani basati sullo studio di altrettanti strumenti, in cui il sassofono di André Leroux libera anelli di suono che si scompongono in effetti caleidoscopici (Ricochets), la chitarra di Tim Brady genera architetture fantastiche grazie a un brillantissimo processo di elaborazione in studio (Misfit) e il clarinetto di Lori Freedman si trasfigura in un’avvolgente nebulosa di drones e de!ays (low memory #1). Materia elettroacustica purissima, suggestiva, iridescenre, perfettamente bilanciata.

Manuella Blackburn, inglese di Londra, è invece una giovane compositrice (del 1984) che utilizza una materia sonora più fragile e sfuggente, meditativa (l’atmosfera da giardino giapponese evocata da field recordings e strumenti tradizionali in Karita oto), mutevole (le elaborazioni timbriche di Spectral Spaces) e vagamente ironica (l’uso degli utensili da cucina in Kitchen Alchemy). Il suo Forrmes audibles è un mìcro-universo ricco di sfumarure e sorprese in cui si apprezza l’estrema varietà dei contenuti e la profondità di una ricerca che con lucidità riesce brillantemente ad eludere la routine accademica.

Coming on the uncommon format of DVD-Audio to exploit the sonic cinematic quality of 5.1 surround, this second solo release by Montréal-based composer Monique Jean succeeds in enmeshing listeners by means of meticulously moulded reticulums whose intrinsically intricacy seems to have been unravelled in order to make every graduated shading more appraisable and enjoyable by the adoption of a sort of modular laying of sonic flagstones or, to reprise the title chosen by Monique, a series of grafts and insertions. After the immersive long-lasting first track Givre (French word for “hard rime,” the crystallization of water drops, caused by the so-called supercooling of fog), which renders this freezing process in an extraordinarily vivid way by means of electroacoustic weaponry, granular sounds, thin whishes an withering sonic entities, Monique elevates the concept, abridged in the title of her album (Greffes is the French word for grasps), by three impressive grasps of traditional acoustic instruments into acusmatic offshoots: Ricochet sounds like the tuning of a saxophone into a complicate system of dampers and shock absorbers, Misfit — my favorite sonic game — seems to represent the transplant of electronic and electric circuits and belt sanders within the body of an electric guitar while on low memory #3, Monique seems to trace the adventourous journey of clarinet sound over a route of tension pulleys, trip hammers and rusty wheelbarrows. On the final low memory #1, a windmill of viscous drones, woody burrs and metallic creaking gropes into electric gusts in a streamlined way which will make it easy to metabolize even for listeners, who are not accustomed to this kind of sonorities and are invited to explore the interesting sonic research of tensions and ruptures of sonic matter and the transmutation of concrete sounds into a poetic dimension by this composer.

On vous parle pour la première fois du label Empreintes Digitales, et pourtant on en suit toutes les sorties avec une attention systématique. Pour comprendre cette confiance aveugle, il faut préciser que la structure est l’une des plus grandes références en matière d’électroacoustique mondiale. […] Et pour cause, Empreintes Digitales ne sort jamais de mauvais disque. Si on ne connait pas la moitié du quart des artistes présents sur la structure (à moins de vivre dans l’underground montréalais), tous ont en commun de justifier des curriculum vitae plus que pointus. Car Empreintes Digitales, c’est avant tout un rassemblement de mecs bardés de diplômes en composition électroacoustique. On est ici dans la frange «dure» du genre, celle qui fait la jonction entre les mathématiques appliquées et la stricte composition. Un catalogue qui peut paraître comme trop pieux pour les profanes, mais qui devrait attirer l’attention – si ce n’est déjà fait – des amateurs de risque contrôlés.

Enfin si on vous parle de tout cela, c’est parce que Monique Jean vient récemment d’apporter sa pierre à l’édifice, et de bien belle manière qui plus est. On la connait peu, pour ne pas dire pas du tout, mais ce qu’on entend sur les cinq longues pièces de Greffes nous suffit pour la considérer comme une pièce essentielle de l’échiquier canadien du genre électroacoustique. Rien que le Givre d’ouverture justifie à lui seul l’achat de ce DVD-Audio (ah oui, on a oublié de vous dire, la structure ne publie que sur ce format pour présenter ses travaux en configuration 5.1): magnifique monstre de dix-sept minutes qui joue sur les infrabasses, les balises signalétiques et les micro-fractures pour transcender d’une magnifique manière cette première étude rigoureuse du son.

On pourrait d’ailleurs croire à l’écoute de ce premier titre que Greffes annonce un disque de bon écolier, ce qui est finalement loin d’être le cas. Car les quatre titres qui suivent optent pour une voie bien plus audacieuse (même si la maîtrise de Givre n’a rien de péjoratif), voire casse-gueule. Guitares préparées, clarinettes et saxophones formeront tour à tour les bases de titres plus ou moins longs, assurant à cet ensemble des atours organiques virulents, parfois noise et déroutants.

Quoiqu’il en soit, derrière revient la même maîtrise, permanente malgré cette volonté de vouloir sortir d’une image trop scolaire. Un très bon disque, qui appelle sans cesse à la réécoute. Histoire de s’assurer qu’on n’en a pas fait le tour, que les interrogations sont là pour durer. Pour tous les amateurs de sonorités boisées.

Die klanglich hochwertige DVD-Audio des 2. Soloalbums der Kanadierin Monique Jean bietet sehr gegenteiliges. Die ersten knapp 18 Minuten bauen aus elektronischen Knirschen und Brummen, eingespielten Geräuschen und schweren elektronischen Drowns eine gespenstische Atmosphäre. Das DVD-Audio Format macht hier doppelt Sinn, denn so wirken die Drowns selbst bei normaler Lautstärke wie ein kleines Erdbeben und die Sounds kommen glasklar herüber. So entsteht Geräuschkopfkino mit manchmal wie zufällig entstehenden Melodien.

Danach taucht man als Vierer in tiefe Musique Concrète Gefilde ab. Die elektronischen Geräusche sind immer noch vorhanden, werden nun jedoch mit dissonant gespielten Instrumenten (Saxophon, Gitarre und Klarinette) “veredelt”. Das kann man wahlweise als große Kunst oder auch als reine Kakophonie bezeichnen. Dieses Klangmenü geht über Stücke. Stücke, bis man im abschließenden, wieder dem ersten ähnelnden Klangkosmos mündet.

Das ist kein einfacher Stoff und nichts zum nebenbei hören. Die Arrangements sind ebenso wie der Klang beeindruckend.

Auf der DVD-Audio werden die Tracks als hochauflösende MP3’s mitgeliefert, die wie immer Kunstvoll gestaltete Papphülle bietet reichlich Informationen zur Künstlerin und ihrem Antrieb.