Bangor New Music festival, held under the auspices of the university’s School of Music, celebrated its 10th anniversary with its most ambitious programme to date, and no concert signalled the event’s energy and range better than the one given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and featuring three firsts.

The school boasts three notable composers – Pwyll ap Siôn, Andrew Lewis and Guto Puw – and works by them made up the challenging first half.

Ap Siôn’s Gwales, dating from 1995, pays homage to the late William Mathias, under whose aegis music flourished at Bangor. Building on fragments quoted from Mozart’s Requiem, the work depicts a journey towards the mythical island of Gwales.

In the first of the new pieces, Andrew Lewis also took us on a journey, this time in and out of consciousness. Number Nine Dream explored the first movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony through the hazy veil of the contemporary electroacoustic sound-world, making for an absorbing aural experience.

Hologram, by Guto Puw, BBCNOW’s resident composer, exists emphatically in the present, with his ascetic approach to structure balanced by a sensuous engagement with sound. It was delivered with startling clarity by the conductor Grant Llewellyn.

Wales is the spiritual home of the composer Adrian Williams, and the contemplative, questioning vein that its landscape has permitted him to articulate was reflected in his Cello Concerto, premiered here by Raphael Wallfisch. The concerto seeks to reconcile in its single long span an introverted, blues-inflected expressiveness with a freer, unselfconsciously flowing idiom. It was indicative of Williams’s instinctive ability to communicate directly that this was so warmly received by the audience.

Robert Normandeau présentera une nouvelle version multipistes (26 pistes) de son œuvre StrinGDberg le 27 mars 2010 au festival Présences «électronique» à Paris (France).

La pièce Premières traces du Choucas de Francis Dhomont est au programme du Electroacoustic Symposium du Sonic Artists in Wales (SAW) le 25 mars 2010.

Robert Normandeau présentera un concert de musique montréalaise le 24 mars 2010 au concert Soundings à Limerick (Irlande). Au programme des musiques du compositeur — Palimpseste, Jeu de langues et Éden — et des musiques de Montréal — Nicolas Bernier et Dominic Thibault.

La maison de disques empreintes DIGITALes a de nouveau été invitée à participer aux événements du Prix des musiques nouvelles Qwartz dont la 6^e édition aura lieu le 2 et 3 avril 2010 au Palais Brongniart (métro Bourse) à Paris (France). Venez nous retrouver dès 14h au stand #36: l’entrée au Marché est gratuite. Jean-François Denis et Christian Zanési participeront à une table ronde consacrée à l’héritage de Pierre Schaeffer le 2 avril; le lendemain à 18h Mathew Adkins spatialisera son Symbiont sur l’acousmonium.

Ritmi di oggetti, the first track on La Notte fa, is an orgy of stripped-down, fuzz-toned rhythm; the second track, Unlisted Card Number, is all textural dub ambient percussion; and the third piece, Paxil Origami Club, sounds like broken-down and refracted disco, with the flashing lights but minus the cheese. And that’s just the first third of the album. Côté and Dontigny piece together their aural constructions from fragments of pop culture with tapes and electronics, cutting up and reassembling samples from sources as diverse as Maurice Ravel, Don Cherry and Ol’ Dirty Bastard into strange and surprisingly accessible electro-dance delights.