A composer of electroacoustic music, Denis Smalley came from a classical music background and followed the academic path. Since 1994 he is head of the Department of Music at City University (London, England). All his works (except a couple of early ones) are for tape or instrument and tape. He has albums out on empreintes DIGITALes, UEA Recordings and Effects Input. His music shares similarities with Jonty Harrison and the composers associated with BEAST.

Smalley was born 1946 in Nelson, New Zealand. He learned piano and organ at a young age. His first degree was a diploma in organ performance from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). In his home country he premiered works for organ by Olivier Messiaen and Gyorgy Ligeti in the late 1960s. He taught music at Wellington College for three years before the French Government awarded him a grant in 1971. He studied in Messiaen’s composition class for a year at the Conservatoire de Paris, but he also took the electroacoustic music course dispensed at the time by the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM). Musique concrète was a revelation to him and he quickly turned away from performance and classical composition to concentrate solely on tape music.

After completing the Conservatoire’s “Diplôme de musique électroacoustique et de recherche musicale” (he was one of the first students to do so), Smalley moved to England to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of York. His first known works date from that period. Gradual won the Fylkingen Prize in 1975. He was appointed lecturer at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England) the following year and remained there until his appointment at City University.

Between 1976 and 1986, Smalley actively promoted electroacoustic music, developing the concept of sound diffusion in England. He is also renown as a theoretician in electroacoustic music aesthetics. He developed the notion of “spectromorphology,” the shaping of sound spectra through time. His other awards include an Euphonie d’Or (Bourges competition) in 1992 for Darkness After Time’s Colours and a Golden Nica (Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria) in 1988 for Clarinet Threads.

Canadian electroacoustic composer Darren Copeland focused his work on environmental sound sources. His approach shares similarities with Hildegard Westerkamp’s, but he never reached her level of international recognition. Copeland studied composition at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) with Barry Truax while plundered through the institution’s World Soundscape Collection. He also studied with Jonty Harrison in Birmingham, UK. A man of radio and a gifted creator of theatre soundtracks, he contributed to a few compilation CDs (Storm of Drones, DisContact II) in the early 1990s and released his first album, Rendu visible, in 1998 on empreintes DIGITALes. It was hardly noticed. His interest in boundaries between electroacoustics, radio art and theatre led to interesting but undocumented works, such as his adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play and the live radio event “Wireless Graffiti,” produced during his collaboration with Vancouver Pro Musica. He is now on the board of the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology and runs New Adventures in Sound Art, a Canadian association devoted to developing electroacoustic music as a performance art.

No Type, David Turgeon’s Montréal-based Net-only label with 67 ‘releases’ posted in the past four years, hits aluminium with The Freest of Radicals (IMNT 0201/02). True to No Type’s range, there are plenty of sounds to captivate and confound spread across the two platters, cleverly titled “bait disc” and “switch disc”. “Bait” presents the groovier stuff: distressed techno (Eucci’s Baribizon & Tape), Viratone Ballad’s drum & baste, and developmentally challenged hip-hop of Tomas Jirku’s I Think I’m In Love. There’s also beatless sound and noise, like Magali Babin’s Petit jardin, or 833-45’s blistering Spook, a prickly analogue critter in the vein of Pan Sonic. Napalm Jazz’s De la viande bio sticks to a relatively conventional IDM template — to exquisite effect. “Switch” offers a more understated approach, via drones, simmering whines and Ambient rumble from artists like Oeuf Korrekt, Diablamatomica, Chris Degiere and Alphacat. The common wisdom about the internet being the music industry’s great promotional device is overturned here: as a primer for notype.com, it’s a handy guide for navigating the label’s roster. Happy mousing.

Non, il ne s’agit pas d’une quelconque opinion formulée par Besancenot, ni même une allusion au mécontentement de votre préposé habituel à propos de l’application des 35 heures à la Poste.

Yves Beaupré est facteur d’instruments. Plus particulièrement de clavecin. Il en joue aussi d’ailleurs. Passionné par ailleurs par les traitements sonores, il nous offre ici une suite en six tableaux, basée sur l’informatisation des sonorités des divers matériaux de son instrument de prédilection (bois, laiton…).

Chaque séquence, à la fois autonome et partie d’un tout, visite non pas tant des paramètres différents, mais un univers sonore distinct. Ainsi, La Beauséjour laisse davantage que les autres tableaux transparaitre les sons de cordes, plus ou moins cristallins, tandis que La Laurendeau travaille plutôt sur des timbres évoquant l’univers aquatique des bruitages de “Yellow submarine” ou de “Octopus Garden”: La Pelots Point est parcourue de sonorités lugubres, d’effets de voix un peu chaotiques pour déboucher sur La DDB, vaste parcours d’un espace désertique parfois traversé et peu à peu animé par la présence de telle ou telle espèce virtuelle inquiétante.