Rien à voir (nothing to see) is not true. When Robert Normandeau sets up tomorrow night at the Robert Gill Theatre, the stage will in fact be filled with something — a load of sound-amplifying speakers. Anything else, like real people or just a simple music stand, might get in the way of the musical sounds. And that’s one thing that won’t happen at a Normandeau concert of electronic music. Here the sound is a spectacle even if it has nothing to show (perhaps a word should be coined for this sound-only show, something like an “auracle.” There have been those over the years who have urged the 46-year old composer to add a visual element. “But we resist,” he replies. “It’s called Rien à voir to make clear to everyone this is not a show.” This can be a problem for some people. So can the sounds Normandeau creates — abstract, tuneless rhythm-free whooshes and swooshes, and electronica that goes ping in the dark. Tomorrow night, he is joined by two other practitioners of this art in the dark: his mentor, Francis Dhomont and a younger colleague, Louis Dufort. “At this concert, there really is nothing to look at,” Normandeau says. “There is nothing of interest to sit in front of. The performance itself is minimal. It is often presented in the dark.” Does this sound like a lot of fun? Well, it can be, he goes on. “In this way, the audience becomes an audience,” he says. What happens is probably the most musical experience in anyone’s life. Electroacoustic music was Normandeau’s turf well before he got his degree in musical composition from Université Laval in Québec City in 1984. Back in the early ’80s, it looked like the place to be. It looked like it might be the future of serious music, taking it to the next level. It even had a base in popular culture. All those techno-Brit bands were making electro-sounds so fashionable in hip magazines like The Face. Even Paul McCartney talked about Stockhausen, electronic music’s Big Cheese. So much for yesterday. Instead of replacing symphonic classical music, electronic music became its frighteningly eccentric second cousin. Since then, we’ve had no choice but to love it on its own terms. “Electroacoustic music should not be compared to anything else,” says Normandeau. “The major innovation in it is that the composer does everything in the studio. He doesn’t have to care about the reality of the stage or the realism of his gestures. He doesn’t have to think about someone else reading his score.” “I think being this kind of composer is a lot closer to being a writer or sculptor. We work like sculptors; we sculpt sound and space. We have to adjust our performance to the acoustics of the hall. Basically the music is written in the studio, but we have to fine-tune it for the performance.” “But even with this kind of taped music, I don’t think a live performance can be replaced. The live performance is important for human beings. It is a ritual. Going to a place and spending time with other people is something we need in our lives. “In the past, when we thought about electronic music as being the extension of the instrumental musical world, it didn’t work out very well because the electronic instruments are pretty primitive compared to regular instruments. The quality of sound you have when you play a violin or piano comes from centuries of research. In fact, we haven’t invented a new instrument in over a century. The last one was a saxophone.” Yes, but there is the computer, he admits. This is good news for composers and bad news. The bad news is that, “when you are working with a computer, you lose contact with the music. You watch what you are doing. You lose contact with the sound. Yet because with computers so many people are working at home, music can become very personal and very intimate.”

A connection between the electroacoustic academy and legions of more, uh, amateur practitioners of electronic composition is infrequently made, but this bold move by Rephlex brings it out into the open. Licensed from the hallowed Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes, which exists to document developments in electroacoustic and acousmatic music, this collection by celebrated Québécois composer Robert Normandeau is an object lesson in the infinite possibilities of sonic manipulation. Offen using the simplest source material — much herein is fashioned purely from the human voice Normandeau conjures windswept soundscapes of thrilling complexity. His sparkling array of sharply delineated sonic events and immaculate attention to spatial placement combine to produce music that effortlessly outguns most greyscale offerings from the laptop massive.

Robert Normandeau is a leading figure in the French-Canadian acousmatic school of electroacoustic composition. This collection of his works offers an interesting survey of pieces for tape dating from 1985 to 1999.

Éclats de voix (“Bursts of Voices,” 1991) was winner of 1st Prize for Jury as well as Public’s Prize at Noroit 91. The work is constructed entirely from computer-processed samples of the voice of an 11-year old — although this source is, in fact, hardly ever obvious. The exquisite sonorities (representing five childhood ‘states’) that Normandeau wrests from his source are entirely captivating (like nearly all of his work) and the piece is an absolute delight from start to finish. The disc’s opening work, Bédé (1990) is an electroacoustic miniature, of just 3 minutes duration, derived from the same source material but making an interesting contrast with Éclats de voix. The source sounds in Bédé are more discernible for what they are; the piece is also rather darker and gives a somewhat more disturbing view of childhood than that presented in the later work.

The third work on the disc, Spleen (1993) continues the same theme. Awarded the Public’s Prize at Noroit 93, this piece is constructed entirely from processed vocal samples of the voices of four 16-year old adolescents. Its restless pulsing rhythms and sudden mood-swings portray only too well most people’s experience of that time of life and in a way that is impossible to draw away from! Fabulous stuff!

Matrechka (1986) is a lengthy and highly abstracted work, featuring a complex sound-world (of largely undiscernible origin) which unfolds by degrees, each of its sections revealing another within it, like the nest of Russian dolls of its title. By contrast, Le cap de la tourmente (1985) is a dark and brooding 7-minute ‘movement’ from the much longer “Musique holographique,” which accompanied an exhibit of sculptures with holograms (holosculptures) by Georges Dyens. Its inclusion here feels like something of a filler, to my way of thinking, although it is well worth a listen.

The closing work on the CD, Ellipse (1999), is constructed entirely from guitar sounds and was originally commissioned by Arturo Parra to form the tape part of a work for tape and guitar. Somewhere along the compositional path, however, Ellipse took a different direction and emerged as a solo tape piece, representing the composer’s half of the intended musical dialogue: as the ellipsis of the title, “omitting… elements of meaning,… allowing the interlocutor, the listener, to fill in the blanks.”

Overall, this is a worthwhile collection of Normandeau’s music, although it presents nothing that isn’t available on other releases of his music. It is certainly worh having if you can’t locate copies of the empreintes DIGITALes releases.

Robert Normandeau is Québec’s leading electroacoustic composer after Francis Dhomont. One generation younger than his teacher, he took his best techniques and pushed them further into the “cinema for the ear.” All about climates, drama and narrative, his works capture the listener’s attention, either in concert settings or through his steady output of albums.

Born March 11, 1955 in Quebec City, Normandeau followed the academic route to musique concrète: he obtained his bachelor degree from the Université Laval (Québec) in 1984, his master degree at the Université de Montréal in 1988, and the first Ph.D. degree given by this institution four years later. He studied with Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont.

Normandeau played a key role in the development of Canadian electroacoustic music. In 1987 he co-founded the Canadian Electroacoustic Community; he was an active member of the ACREQ, and co-founded the non-profit organization Réseaux through which he produced numerous concert events. He teaches acoustics and electroacoustics at the Université de Montréal since 1988.

Although he occasionally writes pieces for instrument(s) and tape, most of Normandeau’s output falls into the “acousmatic” category. His first CD, Lieux inouïs, came out in 1990. It revealed strong stylistic similarities with his mentor Dhomont, especially his sense of the narrative. Tangram, in 1994, gave first examples of his fascination with speech. International consecration came in 1996 when he was awarded the prestigious Golden Nica at that year’s edition of the Ars Electronica competition for the work Le renard et la rose, loosely based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s tale Le petit prince. The piece was included on three compilation CDs before finding its way on his third solo album Figures.

Highly acclaimed Canadian electronic composer Robert Normandeau makes his rephlex debut with Sonars, keeping in line of general weirdness from the label, but not truly fitting into the braindance category. Instead, it is a highly experimental composition that relies on the concept of “sound” and every possible distortion available, all orchestrated into a bizarre soundscape of random click-click-clicks to sweeping echoes, and then cluminating in loud waves of sound. Like I said, this is highly experimental, in a way that might not please the ears of Rephlex’s general audience. A lot of the more experimental releases that Rephlex prides itself on all maintain some semblence of actual music, in that there lies some kind of structure, no matter how “out there” it is. But there is no such structure on this release, it is more of a sound photograph, a way of listening to life, in various applications.

Boasting a huge discography, and an incredible list of awards and commissions, Normandeau is definitely in the canon of musicians that rely on heavy experimentation and abstract musique concrète pieces. After listening for a while, the most bizarre thing about the album, is the fact that it’s on Rephlex at all. So began the deliberations whether or not the man really exists; it could be an experiment in sound perpetrated by one of the Rephlex crew, but after some careful investigations, Normandeau is in fact legitimate.

It is difficult to judge a disc like this, by what criteria does one compare or contrast it to? It exists on its own plane of weirdness, that calls for a very specific time and place for listening. Perhaps this marks the maturation of Rephlex as a label, and its desire to branch out and showcase other types of electronic talent. So the fine line of electronic composition becomes a little wider here, where Sonars lies at the polar opposite end of the spectrum to what is generic mainstream electronic music, and I suppose that Rephlex lies somewhere in the middle, when compared to Normandeau.

Canadian composer Robert Normandeau comes from a distinctly academic background, with degrees in Electroacoustic Composition, a fistful of international “contemporary music” prizes and a CV filled with commissions and residencies. But Normandeau is also no stranger to crossing the invisible membrane between the world of university appointments and composer conferences and the more challenging side of pop culture electronic music, getting involved with Asphodel Records’ Recombinant festival some years back and now releasing this collection of “acoustimatic” compositions on the Rephlex label. Perhaps that’s because Normandeau seems to have mastered a challenging feat — combining truly exploratory sound manipulation, creation and compositional structures into works that are still engaging outside of their theoretical frameworks. In other words, they’re actually interesting to listen to.

Sonars collects six works, spanning fourteen years, from 1985 to 1999. Despite the wide time frame in which Normandeau created these compositions, the CD is surprisingly coherent and unified. Each piece is a seamless continuum between dramatically artificial and dislocated organic sources. You’re continually confronted with roiling cascades of chiming synthetics — sounds that seem entirely unnatural at first listen. With closer attention, the layers of artificiality and resynthesis are peeled away, revealing the source material (in many of these pieces, wordless vocalizations and mouth sounds). Carefully calculated, this play between the natural and the synthetic draws you deeper into each piece, inviting you to listen and analyze each fragment. The earlier works on this collection seem more self-consciously dramatic (Le cap de la tourmente, for example). While this is not necessarily disappointing, they’re not as subtle, layered or perhaps internally referential as some of the more recent pieces. 1999’s Ellipse is especially satisfying, creating a mysterious soundscape of half-defined scraping and scratching, suggesting strings, contact microphones, late night movement in your walls…

Each piece is nonlinear, self-sustaining and self-propelling — they’re consistent in their sonic language, and attentive listeners will hear and sense the progression and development in the composition without Normandeau ever stooping to draw an explict line from one to the next. These aren’t simple works, however, and they’ll not be for everyone. Normandeau doesn’t entirely shy away from rhythmic construction like some in academic electroacoustic music, but listeners seeking the more explictly beat-oriented material of Rephlex, or more traditional song structures, will be left scratching their heads. Dispense with those expectations and you’ll be richly rewarded by Normandeau’s universe of familiar yet foreign tones — a “cinema for the ear” which will lead you down unexpected paths.