Denis Smalley créera Ringing Down the Sun, une nouvelle pièce multiphonique (6 canaux) commandée par DIEM (Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music), à Århus le 13 juin 2002.

Le compositeur montréalais Yves Daoust signe la musique pour la nouvelle production du Théâtre du Rideau vert, «La trappe», d’après une traduction de l’œuvre «The Mousetrap» d’Agatha Christie par René-Daniel Dubois et mise en scène par Jean Asselin. À Montréal du 4 juin au 10 juillet 2002.

La canadienne Marcelle Deschênes est l’un des compositeurs récompensés lors de l’édition 2002 du Concours international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges lorsqu’elle s’est vue décerner le prix dans la catégorie «œuvre pour le multimédia» pour sa pièce Die Dyer (vidéo de Alain Pelletier). Elsa Justel a reçu une mention dans la même catégorie pour son œuvre Destellos. Dans la catégorie «musique électroacoustique de studio sans instrument», le canadien David Berezan s’est mérité le premier prix du Trivium. Également dans cette même catégorie, Jens Hedman s’est mérité une mention pour sa composition REcoil. Outre les musiques primées, les compositions Gwerz d’Elsa Justel, Low Memory #2 de Monique Jean ainsi que L’éveil d’un titan de Jean-François Laporte avaient été sélectionnées dans leur catégorie respective.

En concert lors de l’événement «Trois visages de la musique électroacoustique», le compositeur belge Stephan Dunkelman lancera en sol européen son premier CD, Rhizomes, étiquette empreintes DIGITALes, le 11 juin 2002 à la Chapelle de Boendael à Bruxelles (Belgique).

Magali Babin is a performance artist/live sonic experimentalist whose focus is the sound that can be drawn from subtle and not-so-subtle interactions between metallic objects. The album’s title, which in English translates to “Rail Road,” literally means “road of iron.” That translation is apt.

Babin wants her listeners to imagine the objects she is manipulating, and therefore emphasizes their differences. Triturations is grounded in the scraping sound rasped by what sounds like two rough steel blocks, while Petit jardin is tiny metallic beads undercut with an occasional deep, bell-like resonance. La corde uses what sounds suspiciously like the pickup of an electric guitar to scrape some interesting patterns; L’entonnoir engages a ride cymbal to back up the strange, roiling hum in the foreground.

Granted, this music is not for everyone, and even for those willing to go along with Babin’s program, there are moments of needless repetition . Babin is, of course, an artist who will inevitably remain on the fringe, but the iron road that leads to that fringe can definitely be rewarding.

No Type began life in 1998, and continues to this day, as an MP3 label. If the concept seems a bit ludicrous to you — after all, don’t MP3s render the whole record label structure redundant — think of them more as arbiters of quality, or defenders of a defiantly experimental aesthetic. For No Type there are no rules, no “official” sound, no set expectations — everything about them defies convention and strives ardently against categorization and quantification. Therefore, while it’s initially alarming to see No Type embrace the brick-and-mortar world of CDs, those reservations last only a few seconds; The Freest of Radicals, the stellar debut of their “tactile” line, compiles two and a half hours of the most wildly wonderful, defiantly peculiar sounds (music seems too limited a word) you’ll hear this year — compositions that not only discover and explore the union between sonic experimentation and listening pleasure, but cavort gleefully therein.

Broadly speaking, The Freest of Radicals is all about the electronic manipulation of sound. We’re not talking about anything as simple as keyboards and synthesizers, or even the sort of functional, mechanical/algorhythmic processes that yield the blips and bleeps of IDM. The source material on The Freest of Radicals is everything from the barely audible pop and crackle of PCM data to voice samples and video game music — all of it subjected to a variety of data-invasive procedures. Sounds are chopped, hacked, dissected, disintegrated, corroded, smothered, stretched, compressed, torn, fused, mutated and devolved by every conceivable means, creating everything from organic squelching sounds and dog-audible whines to pulsating bass tone arrays, needle-scratch collages and the sound of aluminum siding falling off of a house. For every piece that sounds like the artist left the mic live while tinkering with a hand-made synthesizer (ja_dijiste’s Laquinta), there’s an electro-fried dub odyssey like Tomas Jirku’s I Think I’m In Love, the feverishly brooding jazz-rock of Kannovanik’s creepy Tell Me About Death, Mommy or a crunchy, melodic epic like Alphacat’s exquisite Waveporn. To encounter pieces as fundamentally different as Julie Rousse’s gamelan-hacking Une à six idées improvisées and V.V.’s Moment 3 on the same CD is to receive a joyous (albeit ear-abrading) reminder of the near-infinite variety of sounds available to adventurous listeners. It may hurt like hell, but it’s liberating.

If you’re an old hand at the whole concept of non-musical music — that is, if you’ve sampled the less accessible works of Merzbow, JLIAT or the Ambiances Magnétiques folks — go ahead and dive into The Freest of Radicals with the “Bait” disc, which includes a higher proportion of the compilation’s “difficult” material. It’s here that you’ll find pieces like Magali Babin’s Petit jardin, which anchors its acousmatic explorations (pebbles being scraped up and dropped in a metal pan, perhaps) with a lingering, resonant three-note bass “melody” that pierces the relative silence like a foghorn. You’ll also encounter Camp’s nervously vibrant, high-pitched Oeee (which I’d swear includes a greeting-card version of the Wedding March), the sub-aural dub of Claudia Bonarelli’s They Use Us Back and the trash-compactor conflagration of Napalm Jazz’s kitchen-sink noise epic De la viande bio. The peculiar pleasure of the “Bait” disc comes from finding music where no music had seemed to exist; repeat spins, particularly with the use of headphones, reveal layers of hidden melody — rather like the aural equivalent of the moment when, while watching a subtitled film, you cease to be aware that you’re reading the subtitles. There is great beauty in even the most abrasive of Radicals’ compositions, and its discovery is a profound pleasure.

If you’re looking for something a little more musical at the outset, sample (no pun intended) the “Switch” disc first. After Kalx’s Soundtest puts your speakers through their paces, you’ll slip easily into the pseudo-orchestral “smart techno” of Œuf Korrect’s Hooked on Phone Ethics; the song’s chirping “vocal” synth might even evoke a satisfied smile. Sluts on Tape’s compellingly clever The Last and Finest of Peter Pans would turn Mike Paradinas green with envy, channeling thick layers of morose sci-fi synth into domestic-futuristic melodies, garlanded with white noise and overdriven digital burble-drone. There are glitches, clicks, pops and digital audio artefacts galore, all of them pressed into service to forcibly expand the frontiers of electronic music. Here, dissonance and beauty are two sides of the same spinning coin, and the transition from one to the other is merely a matter of perspective. The “Switch” disc’s final minutes — Infoslut’s explosive (and brilliantly named) sound voyage He Dreamt She Was An Atom, She Dreamt He Was Enola Gay and N.Kra’s sizzling eight-bit Metroid Remix — should leave you breathless.

And this, from a label that you probably would have ignored or dismissed outright in 1998. Albums like The Freest of Radicals restore faith in the musical adventure; the revelations here, both unassuming and astonishing, are the reason we take musical risks, whether we’re slapping down extortionate prices for intriguing-looking import albums or making the time to check out an unassuming CDR from an unknown artist. And increasingly as the years wear on, they’ll be the reason we download.