Created as a sonic accompaniment for the dance troupe O Vertigo, Étude n^o 3 pour cordes et poulies is a recording that steps lightly on its own two feet. Creators Bernier and Poulin-Denis are multidisciplinary artists who crossed paths via their studies of electroacoustic composition at the University of Montréal. Poulin-Denis’s previous training as a dancer and actor doubtlessly led to this specific collaboration. The two have achieved something rare and wonderful: music that has the precision, inner life and depth of field inherent to accomplished electroacoustic work but with a ghostly breath of melody giving it lift and lightness. The electronic elements elicit comparisons to the detailed works of Alva Noto or Ryoji Ikeda but they are only the gears and hinges of a much larger and more delicate machine. Nothing is ever still. Brushed drums shoot right-to-left like chain lightning, voices pop out like snippets of captured radio broadcasts while ticks and chimes well up like a wall of music boxes yet nothing ever seems overwrought or crowded. Bernier’s website / label / micro-community Ekumen is one to keep an eye and/or ear on in the nights to come.

Although Canadian pianist and composer Deschênes has been active for decades in various areas of new music, having undergone training with the likes of Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Guy Reibel and founding CEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community), besides being a main presence in many other collaborations and exhibitions, petits Big Bangs is her first official recording to date, and it’s all the more perplexing that this artist’s expression still hasn’t been duly diffused on a worldwide scale, like it happens for many less deserving but probably better connected entities. In the five pieces comprised by this DVD we experience both the technical mastery and, dare I say, the attitude of a woman that marks her own territory in different sonic regions with a blend of visionary elasticity and historical perspective. As a matter of fact, Deschênes uses many references — often liberally borrowing snippets of material from her colleagues’ output — to generate sound worlds that contain unpredictable expansions, infinite meanings and interpretations of a sensorial attack that often moves on the verge of schizophrenia, yet is dramatically charged with intense beauty, that kind of pleasure deriving from the sheer force of the elements, being them natural or studio-generated. Deschênes is able to exploit the multitude of shades of her electroacoustic palette by not limiting herself to theatricality (although human voice is often utilized to daze and confuse into further interconnections) and also by sapiently fusing actual instruments and tapework, like in Moll, opéra lilliput pour six roches molles in which clarinet, trombone and percussion contribute to a “transposition of children’s dreams of sea” with mind-altering results. Not an easy listen, for sure spiritually remunerative, petits Big Bangs is one of those sleepers that should instead be jet-propelled to a wider attention, as it belongs in the highest rank of contemporary acousmatics.