Review
Roxanne Turcotte may have started with traditional piano conservatoire training, but by the later 1980s she’d taken an electro-acoustic and technology direction and studied under Francis Dhomont. She too is not unwilling to be aligned with ideas of cinema and is working towards an “integrated” music that is wedded to visuals, be they film, theatrical, or installations. Besides her compositional skills, the CD Réverbères (IMED 21173) showcases her work on the synthesizer, with tapes, and with wind instruments on the long bird-call suite, Les oiseaux de Nias. The opener Masques et dichotomies is understated, but still exudes an undercurrent of darkness and mystery which I like; Turcotte is experimenting with ideas about face masks, and how they distort the human voice; subtle explorations of the possibilities afforded by these distortions follow, including unrecognisable speech, coughing and sneezing. It’s a recent (2021) piece, but thankfully makes no explicit connection to face masks in the context of COVID 19.
Another enjoyable piece is Le bruit des soupirs, using the familiar collage form to piece together commonplace sounds recorded on the street — which might sound unexceptional, but Turcotte exhibits great imagination and skill in making her odd juxtapositions, which she calls “short news reports… parleying under a street lamp”. She alludes to travel diaries and “secret gardens”, and the piece feels like a genuine attempt to discover something that is hidden behind the “longing sighs” she hears everywhere. This particular work makes use of materials from 2014-15, first used in an installation about greeting cards. I have no idea what this was, but presumably it wasn’t an exhibit focussing on the designs, and perhaps alluding to revealing the hidden truths about humanity that can be implied within these banal and sentimental communications.