akademikerinnen bin ich immer sehr kritisch: oft ist ihre musik eine reinste effekthascherei oder zu verkopft. Man möchte gerne sagen: weniger ist mehr. Aber hier bin ich begeistert: schöne elektroakustische musik, die konzentriet auf ein paar sounds ganz elegant daher kommt.

La giovane compositrice canadese che si muove in ambito elettroacustico, presenta cinque terni nati dal 2017 a seguire. Le idee alla base delle incisioni garantiscono una buona resa qualitativa euna drammaturgia narrativa. Spicca in tal senso l’apertura Dementia che, prendendo spunto dalla malattia di Alzheimer, descrive paesaggi sonori che effettivamente evocano stati confusionali e frammenti di lucidità.

Léa Boudreau describes herself as “an electronic circuit maker, sound crafter and immersive environment builder.” The Montréal-based artist’s work explores interspecies relationships and “the intersections of capitalism, power dynamics, speciesism, and (various forms of) supremacy to raise awareness over insidious and oppressive structures.”

Her Limaçon is a gorgeous piece of electroacoustic art, available on the wonderful empreintes DIGITALes label. She and I spoke about the new album and her art practice.

[View the 28-minute video interview via The Moderns’ web site.]

Léa Boudreau, a composer of electroacoustic music living in Montréal, creates most of her work imagining sound for various processes and conditions humans face every day. Dementia, the opening track on this physically tactile new album, tries to capture the mental decay of the titular disease, as a series of motifs and phrases become increasingly splintered and disconnected from any initial patterns we sense. Likewise, Recovery aims to sonify the halting steps and struggles humans encounter as they recover from some mental or physical problem; sonic tension transforms into a kind of drifting serenity.

These frameworks clearly drive and inspire Boudreau’s work, but even without such background information her dynamic music excels, opening up a collision of musique concrète and synthesis constructed with a rich compositional logic. Abstraction and melodic shards combine in ever shifting proportions, unconcerned with any stylistic purity.

Her piece Mini-bestiaire pour la fin du monde is meant to convey how several animal and plant species might “evolve beyond the Anthropocene by adapting to extreme environmental conditions,” per the liner notes, but I hear a mix of synthesizer melodies snaking within abstract whooshes and crunches that definitely suggest some elusive kind of thematic development. The middle of the album is occupied by Impromptu[e], where the composer uses cello sounds made by her friend Lara Laverdure as source material — twisted, extended, and chopped-up — for a composition no less rigorous and imaginative than the purely electronic works.

Released via Canada’s self-proclaimed reference label named empreintes DIGITALes on July 1st, 2023 is Limaçon, the first full CD album release by Léa Boudreau. With a total of five compositional pieces rolled out over the course of roughly 42 minutes we see Boudreau exploring a realm of warm, organic and tentative Electronica structures defined and characterized by a use of comforting and all-embracing sinewave bass pulses and playful, oftentimes non-repetive bleeps and sweeps of probably modular origin, Deep Listening Music and swampy Ambient textures paired with abrasive digital scrapings and little joyful melodic motifs leading into large scale panoramic layers, experimentally plucked string sequences as well as faint echoes of Modern Classical music and deeply enchanted atmospheres especially prevalent in tunes like Recovery which would make a great fit as a score for early 70s style space adventure flics in parts whereas the final cut combines noisy, earth-shaking tectonic shifts, distant Field Recordings and a more collage-like approach for a closing just to pick out two standout cuts in particular. Recommended.

Léa Boudreau is an artist we’d love to meet, not only because of her music, but because of her interest in designing “hybrid and ambiguous creatures.” Her curious circuitry imitates robots, animals and other fauna, blurring the line between entities. The same principle holds true for her electro-acoustic works, which on Limaçon tilt toward an as-yet-undefined apocalypse, as explored in the tracks Mini-bestiaire pour la fin du monde (“Mini-bestiary for the end of the world”) and Quatre machines pour sauver le monde (“Four machines to save the world”).

If limaçon (also known as Pascal’s snail) refers to a circle attached to a fixed point, rolling around another circle of the same radius to form a curve, one might ask, “what, then, is Boudreau’s fixed point?” Working backwards, if the curve is the stop-stutter-start of the pointillist music, the fixed point may be a series of invisible, mathematical tempos. Every dot and notch is carefully placed, even bursts of static and other protuberances. Mini-bestiaire pour la fin du monde earns its name with odd creature calls cutting through the drone, like a splicing of a monkey and a bird. The tempo reveals itself at the three-minute mark, with electronic patterns laid across forest crunches. After every stall, the tempo relaunches at a swifter pace, before disappearing in a rainstorm, followed by a swelter of synths, which eventually slow and stop like an unplugged appliance, landing with a splash in a river-fed pool. The playful beeps of the emergent beings suggest androids frolicking in the water as their “parents” honk from the overpass.

The strings of Impromptu[e] and the woodwinds of Recovery are further curve balls. This hybrid of orchestral maneuvers and non-linear robotics is the bread and butter — or shall we say, oil and can of empreintes DIGITALes. The latter piece even incorporates choral snippets, which add a sense of gravitas to the closing minutes. The world, after all, is ending; or is it? Boudreau offers a more positive take than those found in Terminator, The Matrix and other A.I.-phobic scenarios. Humans — or at least recordings of humans — are present in Quatre machines pour sauver le monde, which offers an incredibly busy reflection of the efforts of a few bold machines to prevent global extinction. This urgent composition calls trains, scanners, nanobots and all machines within earshot to report to duty. When the gears settle in the ninth minute, a mechanical rain starts to fall. Once again the hybrid creatures come out to play, reflecting an idyllic, post-organic future.

What is the opposite of a Turing test? Given her early championing of this as-yet-unrecognized populace, we’re pretty sure Boudreau will have a place in the new society; to repurpose a phrase, she seems “more robot than robot,” which to a machine is a seal of approval.