Il y a toujours une certaine légèreté dans les œuvres de Roxanne Turcotte, une légèreté inhabituelle en musique acousmatique. Désordres, son troisième disque chez empreintes DIGITALes, propose deux heures de pièces composées entre 2003 et 2008. À une exception (Sous écoute!, 10 minutes), elles sont toutes soit courtes, soit constituées de mouvements courts. Cette brièveté des idées exposées ne traduit pas une recherche sonore moins poussée, mais simplement une approche qu’on pourrait qualifier de plus populaire. C’est à dire que, souvent, le propos de Turcotte est plus immédiatement palpable, sensible, et moins médiatisé à travers la culture. Du coup, Désordres offre une excellent initiation à l’art sonore. Cela dit, l’album, en péchant par excès (2 heures, 9 œuvres), est quelque peu décousu, et ce manque de cohésion se reflète même dans sa pièce la plus longue, la suite Musée sonore (41 minutes), un peu factice dans l’assemblage de ses parties. Paru en DVD-Audio, avec versions 5.1 et stéréo.

Troisième disque sous ce label montréalais pour l’électroacousticienne, et la surprise est toujours au rendez-vous. Des étonnantes prises de son de Musée sonore (40 minutes!) à la musique mixte d’Espace vital, sans oublier une pointe d’humour ici et là, Roxanne Turcotte se fait plaisir et nous intrigue pendant tout près de deux heures. Des bribes de paroles sorties de nulle part viennent ajouter un peu de surréalisme à ces univers sonores féériques, et les pensées de l’auditeur s’envolent dans toutes les directions. Pour ouvrir la porte de l’univers électroacoustique, c’est le genre de production idéale. Il s’agit d’un DVD-Audio, alors tout ça, qui est déjà superbe en stéréo, est aussi offert en 5.1; imaginez.

Très bel album de musique concrète qui confirme, une fois encore, l’importance de Nicolas Bernier dans le paysage électroacoustique actuel. Une œuvre chargée mais solidement organisée et captivante. Un arc compositionnel parfaitement défini. D’abord paru sur vinyl, maintenant disponible sur CD, le disque étant livré dans la pochette du vinyl original. Le CD comporte une pièce boni: la contribution de Bernier au projet trans_canada d’empreintes DIGITALes.

Hot shit musique concrète found here! There are so many stuffy compositions and constructions that look back to the salad days of tape experimentation in the ’50s and ’60s. Works can get so conceptual with each sound being meant to allude to some particular phrases of Beckett or recapitulate the Merz of Schwitters that the interplay between this found sound and that electronic blorp is totally lost amidst a dull and boring concoction that serves little more than an execution of a grant application. This is certainly not the case for Canadian composer Nicolas Bernier, whose dexterous yet ominous concrete album has landed in the good hands of Hronir, a label which has a small catalogue of brutal collage artists (e.g. Sudden Infant, Raionbashi, GX-Jupitter Larssen) to accompany more oblique voices from the academic world. While Bernier’s work isn’t nearly as toxic as those jackbooted noiseniks, his compositions are wholly discomforting, and we mean that in the best possible light. Within the avant-garde pantheon, Bernier’s work follows that of Michel Chion and Luc Ferrari doing their finest work, through dynamic juxtapositions blurting concrete sounds (bellowing car horns, steam engine growls, leaden explosions, etc) against unsettled atmospheres and spackled dronings that start and stop with a series of repeating punctuations not unlike the strategy that Nurse With Wound mastered on Homotopy To Marie. He’s aware of the cinematic urge for acousmatic works, and pushes Les chambres de l’atelier towards a Lynchian noir with a soft-focus melody warbling in the background to a series of crunched abrasions and eerie footsteps, ruptured by ghostly noises. Excellent, through and through! Limited to 300 copies as well.

Engrossing side of dynamic modern musique concrète by this French-Canadian artist. Already praised by The Wire as “utterly compelling”, Bernier works with the splicing skill of a film editor on usure.paysage to weave a disorienting narrative of disjointed high definition samples and stray sonics. A diffuse rendering and microscopic attention to detail heightens the immersive, hyperreal effect of his persistently shifting arrangements: he never settles on one sound for long, each fragment is placed, swiped away, and juxtaposed with others with a considerate and intriguing flow with never gets tedious or feels random. Over four pieces, ranging from 3 to 11 minutes, we’re wrenched from rattling trains carriages to explosive klangs, extruded through inimitably textured, frictional clouds of heck-knows-what to ear-craning pauses populated with tinkling bells, via stereo-strafing cars and fluid waves of digital static. If you’ve been following Giuseppe Ielasi’s Senufo Editions, in particular the Oreledigneur and Raionbashi sides, or picked up Reinhold Freidl’s Inside Piano LP, this will surely capture your imagination.

Widely praised as “utterly compelling musique concrete” upon its vinyl release in February, Nicolas Bernier’s usure.paysage now sees a limited CD issue with an added track. Bernier’s previously worked with electroacoustics in more performance-based settings but it’s here where he truly excels. Like a film editor Bernier demonstrates particular skill at concocting narrative from the disparate juxtaposition of sounds, but this is not his aim. Rather, sounds are forced to collide, conform and clash with their neighbours, creating unusual blends and hybrids with characters independent from their source. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The four-part work begins with an immediacy to be expected: short bursts of high-volume industrial noise, but this soon parts allowing for a richer array of sounds to be heard. Passing cars, horns, faint Arabic chant, amorphous bass rumble, the tinkering of sharp metallic objects, rasped wood; all carefully laid over a subdued bed of barely audible rustle and pockets of silence. These intersections are frequently thrilling: the frenzied blips and bell tones meeting the closing of an electric door heard midway through part 2’s Les chambres de l’atelier; the brief moments of looped activity riding over dub grey Tim Hecker haze; the shuffled gravel? snow? rice? of 10 passages. The bonus track k.krrkphsssPOW < paysage provides further evidence of Bernier’s knack for abstract sound, a pointillist collage of static tics and digital fizz proceeding along symphonic lines, more portentous but less convincing than the studied detachment of the title work.