A practitioner of “cinema of the ear,” second-generation Montréal electroacoustic composer Robert Normandeau is fond of the sonic narrative. Repurposing field recordings — including animal sounds, water droplets, and human voices — Normandeau creates shapes from sounds, and music from shapes. Finding common textures that connect his sources into coherent pieces, Normandeau’s paths from chaos to beats cover important pages in Animal Collective’s acousmatic atlas, which lead (among other places) to the hushed Jungle Book grotto of Strawberry Jam’s Derek.

Avey Tare: Liquidy sounds? Definitely Robert Normandeau on the empreintes DIGITALes label. Brian brought that CD over to my place once and played it for me and it was the kind of thing where it was weird, liquidy swampy sounds that formed together to make rhythms. It was like something I never heard.