Finalement… empreintes DIGITALes lance aujourd’hui deux nouveaux DVD-Audio en «Surround 5.1»:

• Gilles Gobeil (Québec): Trois songes
• Louis Dufort (Québec): Matériaux composés

Deux virtuoses de la musique concrète et acousmatique — mentor et élève — seront présents au «Binary Cities Event: Montréal, Canada – Avignon, France», un concert NEXMAP. Francis Dhomont y diffusera Here and There et Phonurgie, ainsi que Moirures (une vidéomusique réalisée avec Inés Wickmann). Louis Dufort y créera la vidéomusique Flesh qui explore la relation entre morphologie sonore et visuelle, puis il diffusera 2 œuvres acousmatiques explorant la notion de mouvement; l’une d’elles, Gen_3, est un hommage à Francis Dhomont et Pierre Schaeffer. Cet événement aura lieu au Recombinant Media Labs à San Francisco (ÉU) le 1^er décembre 2007 [et le 2 décembre 2007].

With a festival as inherently risk-taking as the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), it’s a given that some shows will work better than others. There may also be failed experiments, but it’s to the festival’s credit that it doesn’t rely on the tried-and-true. Invariably, even the less-successful performances are, at the very least, worth checking out.

Day three of the 24th edition of FIMAV was all about operating without a safety net — and, as usual, within a wide array of musical contexts — with some of this year’s most and least successful shows yet. […]

Victoriaville matière sonore

Contrasting with Signal Quintet’s performance, Victoriaville matière was a strong idea on paper that didn’t always succeed in the implementation. The premise was good: construct a forum for a number of composers/sound artists to create individual pieces based on field recordings made around the Victoriaville area. Have the process overseen by renowned experimental blender of natural and industrial sounds, Francisco López, and link the pieces together into a single work with a broader overriding arc. In addition to López, Aimé Dontigny, Louis Dufort, Chantal Dumas, Steve Heimbecker, Mathieu Lévesque, Hélène Prévost and Thomas Phillips all contributed to the 90-minute show.

Similar to the Theresa Transistor performance on Day Two, but in the larger Colisée venue, the artists were placed in the center of the hall, surrounded on all sides by the audience and with a sound system facing in around the periphery of the hall. With the equipment setup on a riser with minimal blue lighting, there was little for the audience to watch, encouraging it, instead, to simply absorb the sounds without visuals and to find meanings on a more personal and imagination-driven level.

The eight pieces were linked by a nature recording of birds, used to allow one artist to leave the center stage so that the next could take his/her place. Other than FIMAV CEO and Artistic Director Michel Levasseur’s usual spoken introduction to the show, there was no applause between pieces, nor was there any announcement of order of events, so it was impossible to know whose pieces belonged to whom.

Intriguing sounds were many and diverse, ranging from the natural to the artificial, and there was considerable processing applied. Like Theresa, equal importance was given to where individual sounds appeared and to how they traveled around the aural landscape. The problem was that, to a large extent, the approaches used were obvious and often overly dramatic. Lacking the nuance of Signal Quintet (and, because these were solitary pieces, the interaction of the earlier performance), the overall levels were high, the sounds often overly dense and the collages often too busy for the listener to sense any sort of unified statement.

Sometimes it’s good to make the audience come to the music rather than the other way around, and a better balance of dynamics and more discernable narrative for each piece would have made the entire show more successful. Still, credit is due for an imaginative experiment that, some shortfalls notwithstanding, was well worth pursuing.

Les artistes A_dontigny, Louis Dufort, Chantal Dumas, Steve Heimbecker, Mathieu Lévesque, Francisco López, Tomas Phillips et Hélène Prévost se regrouperont pour former l’ensemble Victoriaville matière sonore qui présentera, sous la direction de Francisco López, une œuvre collective d’art acousmatique pour oreilles attentives réalisée à partir d’enregistrements effectués à Victoriaville. Ce concert aura lieu le 19 mai 2007 lors du 24^e FIMAV.

Le festival Synthèse qui a lieu à Bourges (France) du 1^er au 10 juin 2007 promet une belle édition. À surveiller, la présence de Jon Appleton, Louis Dufort, Denis Dufour, Beatriz Ferreyra, Max Mathews, Barry Truax, Hans Tutschku et Francis Dhomont. Ce dernier présentera Premières traces du Choucas le 4 juin 2007 et une conférence intitulée Hypothèses sur un parcours personnel, le lendemain, 5 juin.

Gilles Gobeil et Alain Thibault seront au cœur de l’événement «Dedans/dehors» dédié à la musique immersive. C’est en deuxième partie que les 2 compositeurs invités donneront une conférence portant sur leurs préoccupations esthétiques, formelles et philosophiques; Louis Dufort en sera le modérateur. La conférence sera suivie d’un concert où Gilles Gobeil et Alain Thibault partageront la scène avec Joël Beauchamp, Pierre-Marc Beaudoin et Jean-François Blouin. Cet événement audio immersif aura lieu le 14 mai 2007 à la SAT (et c’est gratuit…).