Besides being home to the Ircam thinktank and pioneers Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer, France’s place in the history of electroacoustic music and musique concrète is long-deserved. The country’s wonderful Metamkine label continues to release works by artists mining a territory of seemingly limitless aural vistas. Tracking the diversity of their artists, four recent recordings in the label’s series of 20-minute, 3” CDs (tucked away in sharply designed, signature minisleeves) all appear as fragile little artworks inside and out. Michele Bokanowski’s L’étoile absinthe telegraphs sounds mock-symphonic and synthetic, a chamber orchestra lost in a perilous forest of preening strings and stoic electronic hushes, while underfoot the scent of something vaguely sinister beckons. Quite episodic despite it’s length, it effectively broaches an impressive personal dialogue with the listener. Over the course of Dix-sept minutes, Michel Chion deleteriously excavates the musique right out of its concrete, isolating the ear in a toybox of half-heard chorales, defective thermostats, and wristwatch dementia. Sounds are deliberately placed in a stereoheld that makes full use of their color spectrum, yet Chion misplaces his narrative in the execution, yielding phantasmagoric ‘sound-art’ that suffers from incidentalism. No such problem with Zbigniew Karkowski, noisenik and agent provocateur. Consciously Unconscious. Unconsciously Conscious prefers you bask in the pulse of transformer electricity, a series of galvanic hums whose amperage is further rubbed, tweaked and massaged into drones of glorious wow and flutter. Invasive, and in a masterful way. Illustrated amply enough on Train de nuit, collagist Lionel Marchetti moves effortlessly between parallel worlds of experimentation and ephemera. At first, it appears he has stumbled upon a long-lost soundtrack to a François Truffaut film, the scampering of petite footsteps on cobblestones echoing the bleak vision of 400 Blows. Such a fertile beginning unfortunately gives way to abstract constructivism that, while superficially interesting, fails to gel into an engaging whole. On both geographic and musical fronts, history has demonstrated that reunification is often a good thing.

Electroacoustic composer Michel Chion follows up his excellent double CD of recordings based on the texts of novelist Gustave Flaubert with a single piece that manages to sidestep musique concrète clichés. Dix-sept minutes begins with the sound of muted toy lasers and engine-revving sounds before detouring into a jumble of found audio and traditional instruments. Everything is sharply spliced and edited, making for sounds that don’t so much clash as they do coalesce. Faint murmuring, turnstile sounds, and the yip of a mechanical dog vie for attention until traditional instruments—cymbals, flutes, harps, clarinet, deep bells, piano, and faint operatic vocals— become audible. The sounds like a person approaching an instrument, beginning a piece of music, and then abruptly deciding not to play after all—imagine Anton Webern on an extremely indecisive day. Eventually, heavily processed field recordings of children, dogs, and water emerge, curtailing the intermittency, and forming oddly emotive textures.

If you combined the entire recorded works of Bernhard Gunter with Sukora’s excellent TowerCD and compressed it all into one 15-minute helping, this is what it would sound like. The shorter playing time is ideal for academic music newbies, but just as highly recommended to deep listeners everywhere.

In the reknowned series of Metamkine, cinema for the ears, two new releases, and both composers have been presented in this series before. The first is by Michèle Bokanowski, who has worked at Ina-GRM and studied computer music and electronic music with Éliane Radigue. Her piece is built around a short vocal sample, possibly saying the words ‘absinth star’, which is repeated throughout the piece. Hard to recognize because the sound shoots by like a falling star. Other sounds move around the vocal sample like heavenly bodies floating in weightless space. Every comes and goes by in a most austere piece, that is almost like a soundtrack for a Sci-Fi movie. Icy, chilly, small textures floating by, astral voices speak from beyond. Nice work.

Michel Chion now has his third mini CD in this series, and is what it is titled: seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes of musique concrète. Chion works with the idea of real time, which is odd in musique concrète, because there people work with fixed, pre-recorded sounds. Dix-sept minutes is a collage of found sounds, outdoor, indoor, media sounds, which all merge together into a tense collage of sound, which at times is a true pandemonium, but most of the times they work nicely a long each other. A strong work.