Décrire un disque comme Les arbres a tout d’un exercice fastidieux. On commencera par dire qu’il s’agit là d’une collaboration entre le producteur originaire de Montréal Nicolas Bernier et son compère Urban9, ce dernier œuvrant comme artiste visuel. Mais au-delà des mots, Nicolas Bernier tend à créer une véritable machine de sentiments, rendant la tentative de justification de mon engouement vaine et presque inutile. Coincé entre une musique acousmatique abyssale et une dérive des matériaux électroniques les plus divers, Les arbres se dégage rapidement des schémas souvent froids et monochromes imposés par la musique concrète.

C’est que l’ensemble est sûrement trop bien pensé et orchestré pour y avoir quoi que ce soit à redire. Basé sur de longues envolées solitaires d’un piano qui s’abandonne à des improvisations presque aléatoires, les titres composés par Nicolas Bernier dessinent avec lenteur des paysages désertés, rongés par la vermine. De plan séquence en plan séquence, on découvre un savoir-composer hors norme, bien souvent mis en pratique par des glissements abrupts, des ruptures qui nous ouvrent subitement les portes d’un autre théâtre, ou se joue une autre fin du monde. Ces pianos mélancoliques ne seraient bien évidemment rien sans l’orchestration minimaliste qui les entoure: grésillements électriques, vibraphones, guitares et cuivres en tous genres font dévier ces lignes mélancoliques de leur tentation sentimentaliste pour mieux orienter l’auditeur vers une introspection inévitable et douloureuse.

À ce titre, la prose de Nicolas Bernier n’a rien de féérique, il travaille sur le plan de la finalité bien humaine qui le compose en s’assurant de vider sa musique des vieilles composantes ésotériques qui mineraient le sérieux du propos. Les six pistes de ce projet colossal abordent des ambiances violentes par leurs pouvoirs d’évocation, par l’interaction sensée de leurs composantes. Et dès que tout aura fondu à vos côtés, vous pourrez apprivoiser la bête et jouer avec à découvrir les plaines et montagnes d’un monde où se côtoient fourmis mécaniques, ombres fantomatiques, geysers émotionnels et autres escaliers de cordes déchirantes. Pas étonnant alors qu’on parle de photographie sonore, de captation, de fixation, de réformation sonore, de bricolage ou encore d’archivage au sein de cette superproduction.

C’est que finalement, Nicolas Bernier est un maître en la matière, un élève appliqué qui, plein de références dans les poches, retranscrit avec passion l’enseignement du savoir que renferme la musique électroacoustique qui lui a été inculqué à l’Université de Montréal. Mais au-delà des schémas carrés et coincés que peuvent renfermer un cursus universitaire, Nicolas Bernier explose littéralement en proposant une perle electronica / concrète / classique / ambient / noisy dont le retentissement a une portée universelle. Un disque qui laissera très certainement des traces à tous ceux qui auront le bonheur d’y laisser traîner une oreille. Passionné et passionant. 9 / 10

Theodore Lotis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1967. I can easily place myself in that location and time, because in 1967, right after the Six-Day war in the Middle East, I was sailing across the Adriatic and the Mediterranean Seas aboard the Italian passenger ship M/S Messapia of the Adriatica Shipping Company, from Venice in Italy to Haifa in Israel, to spend some youthful months at a kibbutz (Gan Shmuel), which was a possibility to stay away abroad in search of adventure, even if you had no money — and in 1967 the world was a much, much bigger place. You really felt that you passed a border even when you went from Sweden to Denmark or Germany. Greece was exotic, and Israel even more so.

I remember with a shudder the time in late August of 1967 passing through the Corinth Canal into the port of Piraeus, and how the leisurely atmosphere of the voyage turned into a brooding, guarded feeling, as if a cloud had suddenly moved in front of the sun. The reason was the military coup that had befallen the Cradle of Democracy in April the same year… The crew aboard M/S Messapia told me to stay in my berth the eight hours we’d be in the harbor, because I had long hair, and that was ruled out by the military junta. Accordingly, I bided my time in my little cabin in Piraeus, reading and sleeping, finally sensing with relief that the ship left the quay and headed back out onto the sea, making possible my ascension onto deck, from where I watched the silhouette of Athens sink back into haze and distance and military repression, as I took some deep breaths of air.

And this was around the time when Theodore Lotis entered this physical world.

To me, Theodore Lotis is a new name, which is why it’s all the more interesting to find out about him. He has been chosen by Empreintes DIGITALes for a new release, and that in itself vouches for quality and talent.

He studied guitar, flute, music analysis and composition in Greece, Belgium and England, and got his PhD in Music at the renowned City University of London. He has achieved a number of instrumental compositions and collaborated with artists within the dance, theatre and video idioms, arriving at the aspects of spectrum, timbre, sonic space and light where he invests his creative forces today.

Currently Theodore Lotis is lecturing at the Ionian University at Corfu, Greece. He is a founding member of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Association (HELMCA) and the Hellenic Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Theodore Lotis has received the honor of being presented in the CD booklet by none other than Denis Smalley; one of the Grand Seigneurs of Electroacoustics, who expresses his impressions thus [my quotes]:

“What most attracts me to the music of Theodore Lotis is his mastery of the spatial image […] The spectral texture is distributed in multiple registers. Layers interact, come and go, relate sympathetically, or pressurize themselves as they seek their place, or move on […] For Theodore Lotis, the distribution of sounds over spectral space and across time creates a diffused ambient space, in much the same way as natural light does […]”

Track 1. Arioso Dolente / Beethoven Op. 110 (2002) [7:06]

It’s one of those coincidences that aren’t any coincidences — according to Deepak Chopra (SynchroDestiny: ISBN 184413219-6; RIDER) — that I start to review Theodore Lotis and find that the first track has a Beethoven lineage back to the Piano Sonatas right at a time when I’ve purchased my sixth complete Beethoven Sonatas Edition, with the blessed pianist Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi). I already had the set with Arthur Schnabel, Wilhelm Backhaus, Wilhelm Kempff, Annie Fischer and Friedrich Gulda). Theodore Lotis specifies that he bases Arioso Dolente on Beethoven’s 31st Sonata, movement 3, even letting on that all the sonic material is derived from a version of that one movement. Of course this makes me pick up Paul Lewis’ fourth set from the Complete Sonatas, issued this year of 2008, and listen to this specific item, before continuing writing, in name of the apparent synchronicity of the moment! It sets a certain subdued, serene emotion in motion right from the cautious beginnings, delicately delivered by Paul Lewis. Theodore Lotis remarks:

“I was […] interested in the spiritual aspects of the sonata. Beethoven had just rebounded from a period of illness […]. Both the joy and the melancholy of life are merged in this movement as an omnipresent duality […]”

At 03:09 — 03:19 a clean quote from the Beethoven Sonata appears like a window on reality, however past and limited, floating in this everness like a lost relic from an unknown culture, blipping like a beacon through the mind as it turns and tumbles away, away…

On both sides, however — i.e. backwards and forwards in linear time (which some of us hang on to as if our lives depended on it, in spite of its illusionary property) — this daunting realism floats in an unknown aspect of space and time that escaped the menacing laws of nature. Lotis’ music expands like unfolding rolls of tinfoil in absolutely steel blue space, touched upon by fingers of light and the eleven-dimensional thoughts of a towering thunderclap of a man; Ludwig van.

With the most delicate and brittle breath of electroacoustics, Theodore Lotis lets the clarity of biased expectation — homeblindness! — mist over with the suggestion of mystery, bringing other aspects of life and sonata to the fore, which for the most part lie dormant in the field of pure potential, and new messages from within reach the surface of the actual, the same way you might find jolly calls from your children written with little fingers in the breath on your bathroom mirror!

This piece opens in shooting rays of piercing light between ominous, dark thunder clouds; the light, dancing pitches moving in an elves’ dance ‘round a heavy, moss laden ice age rock in a Scandinavian coniferous forest; the Giants of the Earth snowcapped on the horizon, in the darker, deeper timbres of Lotis’ imagination.

There is a lot of motion inside this fabric of timbres, and you can sense upwards curves in transparent glissandi, like the fluffy hair of an infant stirred by a summer’s breeze. The murmuring in the back of the day provides a backdrop for incredibly beautiful, tiny events that curl and meander in metallic glares, like gold foil contracting and expanding on black velvet as humidity and temperature shift, as timbres swell and retract. Such is the delicacy of this soundworld; a truly fine-tuned experience.

It was long since I heard such a nuanced and nano-emotioned sound web. At times the tiniest of sonic objects glare and tingle in flurries and swoops out of and back into the mineral realms of sound. The feeling is so abstract, yet physical, that I get a sensation of hovering weightlessness, and almost believe I’ve found a cure for gravity!

At 06:42 a second brief, clear-cut piece of Beethoven keyboard appears, concluding Arioso Dolente / Beethoven Op. 110 — and I think Maria Metaxaki plays the grand piano…

Track 2. A South Wind Will Bring the Sand (2002) [10:11]

The composer explains that he has used granular synthesis to mimic sand grains blowing, so he seems to be working the details and minuscule nuances here too.

As I get caught up in this second track of Theodore Lotis’ Empreintes DIGITALes CD, I feel more and more respect for this composer and his uncanny sonic wizardry, which lets him mix so much motion and so many timbres, while keeping the moment of experience so serene and clean; a transparency of all these events, these sweeping motions-emotions, in which time is exchanged for space and space for time, in a glorious lightness that must be drawn from the realm of the Buddhas, from that enlightened state at the end of perfection.

I feel my senses arriving at an absolute awareness; a stillness in which I can observe and see my life, calm and without remorse or biased reservations. Lotis has tapped into a holy resource, delivering his good medicine in these musical quanta of energy; rainbow mist out of the loudspeakers. Such might a fantasy allowed some freedom of flight soar through your feelings, on listening attentively to the electroacoustics of Theodore Lotis; a pleasant daydream that may even rearrange some of your day-to-day priorities, if you take it to heart, just like a moment in front of a Chagall or a Miró, or a dizzying descent on crampons from the Pyramid Pass into the Unna Räita Valley will.

Track 3. Underwater Theories (2002) [15:39]

Theodore Lotis explains in his introduction to this submerged event that he combines acoustic instruments — for example the human voice and the contrabass — and electronic sounds, initially expecting some kind of rivalry between sounds from such different prerequisites, but he found, he says, that these sounds with such different heritages, “blended together in a concordant way”, with “no confrontations between artificial and natural […]”

The opening couldn’t be more ominous, with diminutive specks of sounding debris squirting over a dark, smoky progress of evil, relentlessly expanding down the duration. Watery, bubbling events turn back on themselves, like someone almost vomiting but managing to get it all down the pipe before it reaches the oral cavity — or like someone swallowing salty seawater, exhausted in the water, almost drowning… but simultaneously these swirling, swooping, bubbling sensations are beautifully chiseled out of the submerged moment. Theodore Lotis manages to keep these two aspects of musical reality going simultaneously; the wet, dire, submerged anatomical state of affairs, and the highly hypothetical, calculating and also dreamy aspect of the free-flowing intellect, safe from all material hazards. This renders the composition a tempting, desirable feel that one cannot resist. I submerge myself in the music and flow with it! If you really commit yourself to the act of listening, you might arrive at a point where you find yourself immersed totally, which is the only honest way to hear Theodore Lotis, really. I come to think of the little girl who stood in front of an impossible (geometrically and architecturally impossible) painting of a building by Maurits Cornelis Escher. She watched and watched and watched, got sucked up in her own act of observing, until she fainted in front of the painting. That is perception at its height! That is the manner in which one ought to hear Theodore Lotis’ sonic art. It is so carefully crafted, so diligently chiseled out of the silence from whence it rises, that it becomes an act of respect for the art as well as the artist to really, really listen.

At times I get the sensation of something really heavy in motion, like a huge locomotive, but with only the vibrations of the motion recorded; not the sounds of engine or rails, but just the things shaking and vibrating; loose things all over the huge moving machine. That is to say that Lotis music, by way of the sounds actually heard hint at something much bigger; hint at a cause that jeopardizes the entire composition.

There are so many sounds of so many kinds in this piece that I can’t even begin to explain them, except that they’re all caught up in a grander motion. The composer just shifts his attention to different places in this moving contraption, like a diver sweeping his flashlight along the hull of a submarine that glides by. I hear all kinds of sonorities, like the rumblings of a dijeridoo and the monotonous rhythms of a small machine of sorts, plus grinding, frictional sonorities, as from the rubbing of a balloon, not to mention dark strokes of humus and clay, and lighter timbres like warm updrafts in the darkness of the void. This music absolutely has no end, although the piece stops after fifteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds…

Track 4. Sibylla’s Voice (2001) [14:53]

Dedicated to Annette Vande Gorne

Lotis explains how he uses the violin and the human voice in this work, albeit heavily treated. His aim is to achieve “a strange vocal feel”. Of course, he refers to classical mythology in a piece named Sibylla’s Voice, i.e. the female prophets who were thought to have access to the god Apollo, from which they derived their cryptic messages, which were received with screams and shouts by the people gathered, who actually believed that they tapped into the mind of the god through the Oracles.

A cackling abstraction of a flock of seabirds opens this piece, white wings fluttering up over a torrential sea that hammers the lower chackras with the real motives of the day, like in a rugged coast by painter Claude Joseph Vernet (1714 — 1789), the planet turning slowly as it moves down its path of gravity. In this way, Theodore Lotis works with the tiny grains of sound inside a wider scope that takes on an atmosphere of a musical biosphere; a perfect realm to present his artistic ideas.

A sequence of myriads of passing sonic strangers in varying pitches and of different durations ride a wave pattern through the score, be it a sound painting of the electromagnetic forces through interstellar space, the swell of an ocean; visible (audible) remnants of a storm died down below the horizon — or the passage of a wave of energy through a brain suffering a migraine attack. Your analogies may move in any of these, or any other direction — or you can try to listen without analogies, just letting the sounds, the pitches, the rhythms, the staggering musical figures pass through your moment, letting them color your atmosphere for a while, while you’re keeping those insistent associations at bay.

Lotis’ musical world is a highly abstract one, of course, in line with the prerogatives of distinct electroacoustic art, but this can be done at various levels of intensity, of abstraction. Lotis works the upper layers of this art, where the air is thin and the colors faint, and the perceptions sometimes white-outed by lack of oxygen — but that is also the altitude where you have the widest views. Before you faint, your visual field is breaking up into patterns of consciousness and unconsciousness, and this is the playground for Theodore Lotis’ music… or, also, in that undefined moment just before falling asleep, when gravity loosens its grip on your material manifestation and lets you hover into a state of daydreams that become movies shown on the inside of your eyelids, when one world is exchanged for another! This music is looking down on mountain ranges!

It may seem contradictory of me to point to Theodore Lotis’ masterly aptitude for sonic abstraction in a piece which he himself counts among his mixed-form works, using acoustic instruments along with his generated sounds; even the human voice… but I can’t — on first hearing, anyway — determine where those instruments arrive or recede. They’re probably poured through Max/MSP software before stitched into the tapestry, like they were in the previous piece, and to me they’re blending so well I can’t make them out, individually. They just color the magic, just like the electronic sounds — and as Stockhausen said at one of his last courses in Kürten, Germany: “Making music is sculpturing air”: All these sounds so wearily arranged, become airy sculptures, compressions of air arranged in time, space and density; shadowy figures of an atmospheric breath!

Track 5. Shadows (2000) [12:05]

A quote from the composer’s introduction:

“Shadows are the dark faces of light, the unexplored view of reality. Obscure or transparent, threatening or airy, a shadow always suggests motion. […] The generative idea throughout the piece is Heraclitus’ principle of the opposed duality. According to the Greek philosopher, an opposed duality contains two poles. Although seemingly opposing, these poles are interdependent and mutually connected. Light and shadow are the two poles of an opposed duality.”

[Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 — 440 B.C.), known as ‘The Obscure,’ was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Ephesus in Asia Minor. As with other pre-Socratics, his writings only survive in fragments quoted by other authors. He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance, but instead claimed that the nature of everything is change itself; he uses fire as a metaphor rather than his solution to material monism. This led to the belief that change is real, and stability illusory. For Heraclitus everything is "in flux"]

This coin — through the first breaths of this piece — rotating on a marble step is so idealized it can only be envisioned as a cartoon coin on a cartoon marble step, spinning at such a high velocity that it would glow, were it a manifest object. In my musical mind, spun there by Theodore Lotis, it can spin at this unparalleled speed without any effort at all, save the imagination and ingenuity of the composer! I get an obviously powerful feeling of motion and lightness in the very first instances of Shadows. Somehow these first centimeters of score places the imagined marble steps in a big, lofty castle high up in the mountains, with a ghostly Daddy Longlegs as the lord of the manor, and with the trigger-happy Mickey Mauser as his esquire, in much the same way that they turned Batman into a quite questionable figure…

If music is poetry, then this is Lord Byron music, so lofty and highbrow, so noble and shiny with etiquette and good heritage — absolutely brilliant and authentic, dancing forth across shiny marble floors: the exquisite art of a dandy, expressing himself in immaculate meter, through sonnets of pale-skinned courtships… but a warning moves like a withheld quake through rock bottom, deep below the floor, like the shadowy motions of the feared Morlochs in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), while the purity and lightness of Lotis’ almost indecent sonic brilliance might equal the pale and infantile Eloi of the same story.

The metal of these sonorities wind and swirl in shiny, polished reflections of a surface, level and smooth down to the hastiest low-range reconnaissance, right in your face — and then suddenly from a space shuttle view, in planetary orbit… and back. The sonic flight, in all its fabulous, immaterial means of motion, magnifies and diminishes with the same Theodore Lotis magnificence. The music demonstrates beauty of a superfluous, nauseous dignity, worthy a Percy Bysshe Shelley in exile, penning his Ode To The West Wind:

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Mythic birds croak and caw two thirds down the score, while bronze-light whirlwinds sway across the valleys in dusty sonorities. We’re deep inside a tale of enchantment by now, prey to the timbres of amnesia that pass like dark curtains over the windows of the mind. Our arms extend out from our bodies, our legs spread, until we’re hovering clouds of crumpling X’s, blown across the languages of the planet; the continents filled with foreign faces facing skywards.

Tracks 6 — 7. La mer (1996) [15:43]

La mer bleue; la mer profonde — à Martha

Lotis:

“La mer expresses the joy and the purity of the water and proposes a listening in two levels; […] an imaginary perception of the sea; serene and stormy […], sun sparkles on the water […]; the second a […] a symbolic perception […]; the passage to Hades and the road to new discoveries.”

Lotis reveals some of his methods in his introduction. He lets on that he uses the electronically treated hum of bees to paint the sounds of waves of the sea. He utilizes a string quartet, electronically chiseled, to take on the likeness of light on surface and liquid fluency.

The first movement of La Mer — track 6 — deals a great deal with the perception of heavy wave formations; the swell of the ocean tugging at a rugged coast; the message from alien intelligences transmitted through space; the outpour of electricity through a cerebral cortex suffering an epileptic episode; a satin curtain moving softly in the draft from a window ajar. The concept, and also the execution of the concept — the sounding material — reminds me of a couple of works by Robert Erickson (1917 — 1997), the California composer (born in Michigan) who was so many younger composers’ (Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick) teacher: Pacific Sirens and Oceans. Pacific Sirens for ensemble & tape achieves this pattern of oceanic swell by large, grey motions in the ensemble and the electronics. Oceans for trumpet and percussion has a more cunning and surprising way of reaching this end; by metal percussion with extremely long reverberation and the most golden of trumpet sounds in long breaths. In fact, much of the serenity and transparency of Theodore Lotis’ electroacoustics could have been born once upon a time in the golden garlands of Robert Erickson’s Oceans; that’s how reminiscent it is of those purely acoustic timbres of gold and air that blesses the duration of Oceans. Of course, Oceans in turn receives much of its otherworldly gold dust glimmer from the idea of a golden age of noble men and fair ladies in legends like the one of Tristan and Isolde, as well as the archetypal vision of a young boy god with golden locks playing absent-mindedly and happily on a white beach against the backdrop of a smoothly rolling sea and a deep blue sky, be it in Cornwall or Folegandros.

Professor Jack D Logan, the Oceans trumpeter, says (in a text on the web):

”Robert Erickson’s Oceans is a composition for solo trumpet and a collection of instruments made by Robert Erickson. It evokes the many experiments that he and I (Jack D. Logan) did when I was a graduate student at UCSD in the Ph.D. program from 1968-1971. In one such experiment, he and I ventured to a storm drain in La Jolla, California that emptied into the ocean for a recording of the acoustic long waves of the sound of the trumpet. Oceans is made from source tape make in St. Paul’s’ Cathedral in San Diego, California in 1971.”

Although this text takes on Theodore Lotis’ music, and not primarily Robert Erickson’s Oceans, I’ll still execute my author-itarian (!) freedom and linger a while longer, quoting here the liner notes that Robert Erickson wrote for the 1971 vinyl issue of Oceans, received with thanks from the trumpeter on the recording, Professor Jack D. Logan, Professor of Music at the School of Music and Dance at San Diego State University, California:

“The composition had its origin in a sound, the remarkable reverberation of a five foot storm drain in La Jolla, California. This drain could be entered from the beach, and one strenuous afternoon of activity yielded tapes of trumpet, percussion and ocean sounds. A year or so later the idea for Oceans came into focus, an expansion and idealization of the sounds heard during that recording expedition. Nevertheless, there is nothing programmatic about the piece, although its long rhythms are more wave-like than are most land-based rhythms.

After exploring many spaces for their sound and reverberation potential, we decided to record in St. Paul’s Cathedral, San Diego. The original storm drain was ruled out — it was too wet, and the sounds of the ocean too insistent. The composition is a mix-down of six over-dubbed tracks, four of trumpet and two of percussion. The percussion sounds are produced by an aluminum bar, about four feet long, with an attached resonator, the same bar used in the original tests, and a single Bb tuning fork. Different beaters and striking points produce different pitches and timbres.”

The second part of Theodore Lotis’ La mer really brings on sonic imagery from submerged regions of the mind, wobbly, wavy, pressurized… fast and winding currents and wildly panning sonorities, as well as twittering, glimmering near-fainting experiences in an atmosphere of slow, strong, dark forces that cannot be dealt with; facts of life that must be accepted as are, no negotiating possible; the shadows of death in rumbling standing waves through subterra and sub marina and subconscious.

The alien, eerie whines near the conclusion of the piece, on that soaring, humming and wheezing darkness of a backdrop, coldly illustrates the dire situation of each lonely soul in transmigration through the frightening and completely objective — and therefore merciless — Bardo of Afterlife; that section of the life-death-life flicker where we must confront ourselves.

Theodore Lotis’ sound worlds are shaped in such merciless brilliance, as to scare as well as sooth; agitate as well as calm. His electroacoustic imagery opens arch after arch on the mind, hallway after inner hallway, finally descending the listener into a hall of mirrors, in which you can find endless angles on yourself, till time indefinite; the Universe observing itself through a human nervous system. The point of departure is the point of arrival. All times are now, all places are here — or… all times are here, all places are now… Listen and unlearn!

“Cinema for the ear” is a much exploited expression in the acousmatic field — including the description of Gilles Gobeil’s work on the liner notes of this DVD — yet there is no doubt that few artists are able to challenge the Quebecoise’s visionary aptitude when it comes to assembling materials that fuse concrete matters and ethereal essences in such a masterful fashion. Trois songes was entirely realized in Karlsruhe, Germany over the course of four residencies between 2005 and 2007, the designer of these complex, often breathtaking architectures inspired both by literature (Jacques Lacarrière, Dante Alighieri) and an unemployed scenario by mythical movie director Andrey Tarkovsky. The most graceful piece on offer is Entre les deux rives du printemps, an impressive consecutiveness of events characterized by large quantities of nocturnal ambiences, crickets underlining unfathomable secluded reverberations, and a magnificent recurrence of echoing ghosts of early polyphonic music. The latter element is indeed a foundation for various circumstances in the record, whose aura is repeatedly wounded by distressed utterances (usually equalized until they become unrecognizable), natural elements — an example being the storm at the beginning of the splendidly exciting Le miroir triste, complete with different species of birds, bells and additional voices — and, last but not least, the surprising presence of René Lussier’s daxophone, a disembodied timbre sounding at times like a voice from the netherworld (the composer describes the instrument as “stunning and rather frightening”). The initial Ombres, espaces, silences… is more or less self-explanatory while trying to sonically describe the life of the “Desert Fathers” at the beginning of the Christian age, strikingly dramatic for the large part with a disquieting closing chorale that might give you the urge to cry. Needless to say, sacred music is again an essential tool in Gobeil’s compositional method for this chapter, but it’s the whole album that deserves to be eulogized for poignant substance and sheer brilliance of the overall result. The best of 2008 for the Canadian label, together with John Young’s Lieu-temps.

Nos gustan los discos que empiezan a llamar nuestra atención desde la misma portada, cuando atacan no sólo a uno sino a dos o más sentidos. Y hay algo en la fachada exterior — sombría, entre grisácea y verdosa, no especialmente vistosa pero sí extrañamente sugestiva — de este álbum que intriga, que invita a imaginar.

Esa sensación no hace sino multiplicarse cuando entra en juego el sonido. Sin titubeos, a pesar del perfil marcadamente abstracto de la propuesta, el disco reclama tu atención desde el primer momento, desde que un estruendoso rechinar mecánico introduce en cuestión de segundos la atmósfera silbante, microscópica y abisal de // Post, el primero de los seis cortes de generoso minutaje — sólo dos bajan de los siete minutos — y estructura mutante que conforman un álbum que surge como resultado de un proceso de colaboración bidireccional mantenido en el tiempo entre el compositor Nicolas Bernier y al artista urban9. El último se ocupó de desarrollar conceptos visuales — seis de ellos, uno por cada canción, acompañan al disco en forma de tarjetas postales — inspirados en los primeros esbozos musicales de Bernier, imágenes en constante re-construcción que a su vez iban interfiriendo en la composición, el desarrollo y los tratamientos de unos paisajes sonoros de arquitectura electroacústica dibujados a base de texturas crepitantes — densas, por momentos aislacionistas o casi industriales, en transformación constante —, grabaciones de campo de corte naturalista — puedes reconocer el cricrí de los grillos, las voces anónimas de unos niños, respiraciones, etc. —, precisas articulaciones de microcirugía digital e instrumentaciones mínimas — de filiación compartida entre el post-rock más sedado y contemplativo, la composición clásico-contemporánea, las orquestaciones propias de la escena electrónica neoclásica, el folk de cámara o el jazz blanco, sosegado y prístino de la escuela ECM — urdidas a base de guitarras, metales, vibráfonos, pianos preparados, flautas, acordeones y cuerdas.

El canadiense Bernier evita con soltura el peligro de la frialdad digital gracias al constante recurso a los más amables timbres acústicos, pero no parece haber jerarquías entre sonidos. Aunque la escuela clásica de Bernier — esa noción académica de la acusmática — se deja notar en algunos tratamientos sonoros — términos como audio photography, audio transfiguration, audio reformation, audio alteration o audio bricolage sucediéndose en los créditos de todos y cada uno de los cortes del disco — un tanto exagerados, aquí priman la textura, el clima y la atmósfera como señas de identidad de una música que a pesar de ser extremadamente meticulosa y técnica consigue sonar humana, orgánica, subyugante y conmovedora, cerebral a la vez que sensual.

Si necesitas nombres para ubicarte, piensa en algo próximo a lo que saldría de viajar hacia el norte agitando en una misma maleta los discos de Eluvium, el primer Encre, Radian, Fennesz, Elegi, Bill Frissell, Svarte Greinerng, Mark Templeton o Ljudbilden & Piloten. Agradabilísima sorpresa.

«C’est en utilisant quelques sons du quotidien que deux artistes montréalais, le musicien Nicolas Bernier et le graphiste Urban9, ont créé une œuvre audiovisuelle alliant musique électroacoustique et images fixes. Tous deux ont utilisés des techniques et des moyens à la fois numériques et analogiques et ont élaboré leur projet de concert, s’inspirant, se nourrissant chacun du travail de l’autre sur plusieurs années. Alors je pense que la plupart d’entre vous on déjà été séduits par une pochette de disque et en on fait l’acquisition dans la simple perspective d’imaginer la musique qui y serait présente. Et bien la le phénomène fonctionne ici dans ce sens et les 6 cartes postales présentes dans l’album et les 6 compositions musicales s’harmonisent avec une très grande précision dans un climat emprunt de douceur, de nostalgie et d’une élégante naïveté. Alors la musique, nous allons l’entendre bien sûr, mais je vous donne quelques indications sur les images, elle sont dans des teintes grises et mettent en scène des arbres et des enfants. Les arbres sont sans feuillage (est-ce une évocation de la tristesse, de l’absence, de la lenteur ou de la mort?) et les enfants à leur tenue semblent venir d’une époque révolue mais ils contrastent par la forte impression de vie qui émane de leur seule présence dans ces paysages désolés. Graphiquement et musicalement ce n’est pas une sensation de tristesse qui domine mais plutôt une véritable force vivante, sereine et poétique.»

Neo-modernista per eccellenza, Nicolas Bernier inizia la sua indagine sulla forma sonora tramite la musica popolare, ma la curiosità finisce per avere la meglio e lo porta ad inscenare un dialogo tra suono e video, danza, cinema, installazioni. Nel 2004, con la compositrice Delphine Measroch, fonda Milliseconde topographie e nel 2006 Ekumen, netlabel dedicata alla promozione delle arti elettroacustiche. Les arbres mette in gioco la vista e l’immaginazione, sei immagini in dimensione cartolina curate dall’artista Urban9 per sei tracce di pura materia organica e digitale la cui chiave di lettura si ispira e a tratti si rivela nell’ onirico mondo dell’infanzia, palcoscenico ideale la cui mutevole forma si tinge di incubi, sogni, magici mondi paralleli e creature immaginarie. Destrutturati collage elettroacustici dall’animo noir, linee essenziali di piano, chitarra e vibrafono, triturate filtrate e ferite (// Post): sonopresagio di un divenire, un timore dai beat sostenuti che avanza, a tratti soffocato da una tempesta glich, una lotta a tratti lenita da un’ anima gentile di violoncello e accordeon (// This Is a Portrait).

Un timore dall’animo fantasma e una pioggia di drones e sottili stratificazioni ambientali, manipolazioni sonore, dilatae note che si riflettono nello spazio e vuoti silenzi che disegnano forme e rifugi per poi riscoprirsi rotolati in nuovi luoghi oscuri (// Piano). Mutamenti per riprendere contatto con il proprio essere fragile, un’anima acustica di accordeon e un flebile ultimo respiro di archi (// Spleen), fragilità che rende comuni il dialogo tra la sensualità di un violoncello e l’imprevedibilità digitale (// Bora), che lotta con le ombre di un basso elettrico e le urla disperate di un violino rincuorato dai cori sibilanti di synth e beat (// Ouverture). Installazione in formato digipack, pillole di sound-art in dimensione tascabile tra acustica purezza e contaminazione digitale una nuova lettura dell’arte in cui mettersi in gioco tra percezioni ed emozioni; “… musica che non possiede un inizio definito o una fine predeterminata, che entra in una nuova fusione con i fenomeni visivi e non vuole altro che mettersi a disposizione di chi ascolta…” (Bernd Schulz). 7 / 10