Seven years ago, experimental composers Gilles Gobeil and René Lussier etched out an informal contract to collaborate on a work inspired by Goethe ’s Faust, to be composed in sync with the structure of the poem. In the seven years this project took to complete, the duo cultivated a painstakingly slow work ethic which, combined with their ravenous perfectionism, allowed the project to undergo a number of conceptual divergences. Goethe took more than 30 years to write Faust, making Gobeil and Lussier’s seven-year effort seem comparatively speedy. And in what have their prolonged efforts resulted? A truly baffling musical/sonic odyssey that incorporates spasmodic guitar jerks, aeroplane noises, bangs, rattles, reverberated voices and long, long moments of static silence — a sonic experiment that nestles itself in the listener’s anticipatory space and just sort of hovers there.

Consisting primarily of protracted inertia interspersed with swiftly swelling blasts of noise, Le contrat will test your patience as much as it rewards it. La nuit la plus longue (The Longest Night), for example, is a twelve minute onslaught of jet blasts, distorted voices, eerily subtle strings, quiet gasps, reverberated bangs, pan flutes, altered church bells and other unnameable found-sounds, spliced into a piece that nests itself in the memory as a fractured, elongated hum. When the sounds finally arrive, however, Gobeil and Lussier create a genuine sonic tension that occasionally verges on anarchy. About ten minutes into “The Longest Night”, a cloud of hissing noise gathers (appropriating what sounds like a choir of mutants), and then a giddy piano sample is pitch-altered, bashed and stitched into a crescendo-heavy explosion of maddening sonic chaos, coming to settle on some truly wonky-sounding church bells. Indeed, Gobeil and Lussier’s propensity for sudden explosions of noise often seems to mirror the manipulative shock-tactics of cinema horror: once a sense of placidity is established, it’s quickly blown apart. On Le cabinet d’étude, a solemn, sporadic strum of nylon guitar is paired with the sound of meowing cats and some truly horrifying, guttural growls.

Heavy-going stuff, and not for the weak-hearted, Le contrat might seem like a manipulative venture into silence/noise dynamism, but Gobeil and Lussier’s unerring commitment to the form makes for a stealthy, undeniably intense listening experience.

Christian Bouchard moves fluidly between lush spacious environments and agitated, rough, edgy punctuations. By doing so, he makes an alliance with soundscape composition, glitch, and acousmatic art. His choices to distort sounds or to magnify normally discarded recorded artifacts are offset by his imagination for colour and his feeling for the inherent nuances of sounds manipulated from environmental sources. In summary, the worlds of glitch and a filmic acousmatic sense go hand in hand in his sensibilities. There is not a conscious attempt to construct narrative in his works like in the Gotfrit CD that I reviewed last month. However, images and vestiges of stories do peer out from time to time, products I think more of the inherent associative qualities of environmental sounds than of a conscious attempt to construct the sense of a storyline in his music. Bouchard’s early works on the CD maintain a compactness and economy that I appreciate more than in his later and more longer-form works. But then again, the use of conceptual structural models in these earlier works, such as the portrait of a soundscape from the point of view of a parking meter, is more appealing to my ears these days than the looser and more meandering structures that are more common in acousmatic art. In closing, Bouchard has a nice edge and grit to his music that I think will appeal to listeners looking for something new.

Materials distributed in various areas according to the methods used abstraction processes emerged from concrète materials taken to different degrees. The link between the various pieces comes from the studio techniques used, which bestow a continuity to the pieces. Kinetic based poetics, in perspective with a sonic plane akin to compute imagery or analogue image digitalization.

One of the most talented acousmatic composers on today’s scene, Canadian Paul Dolden shows his assembling skills in this collection of new and reworked pieces where hundreds of tracks are painstakingly crafted to form castles of imposingly powerful modulations, droning substrata of nuclear fissions and strange concoctions of melody and soundquaking strokes. Dolden pulls all his strings with almost maniacal attention to the completion of every movement until its full development, thereby coasting the shores of contemporary computer music while mixing the whole with bits of irony a la Zappa/Synclavier era, only with a little more redundance — which is probably what the author wanted in the first place. Imaginary giant orchestras are thus able to shake buildings and ears — yet the best moments are the ones where slow spirals of oblique undertows cut a slice of perfection off the picture, bringing that necessary sense of undistinguishable anxiety that’s the moving force of the record.

Fractures doesn’t consist of conventional music… unless, of course, you’re in that poetic/stoned frame of mind in which rustling trees and murmuring highways constitute a symphony. But then, this is precisely what you’re expecting if you’re at all familiar with empreintes DIGITALes.

Fractures’ sixteen tracks of low-level ambient noise — most of it recorded in public places throughout Canada and Europe — form a cohesive and often lovely aural palette. The opening selection, Angle mort, sets out to explore the struggle of an injured patient amid the inhumanity of a hospital room. A trio of tracks titled Trois miniatures en suite experiment with the parameters of the electroacoustic sound, while setting the stage for a twelve-track epic collectively known as Parcelles. Bouchard explains these final selections as illustrating: “the sound environment of a particular time, the chaos of the world, the rural calm, the urban swarms, the energy of the living” and finally, “fragments of moments.” It’s a vivid, fascinating explanation, and like the rest of the liner notes, it lends meaning to the album’s audio/recording experiments.