Les 21 concerts et 5 installations du 3^e New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival auront lieu du 2 au 6 avril 2013. Parmi les compositeurs dont une pièce est présentée, citons ceux d’empreintes DIGITALes: Andrew Lewis, Elizabeth Hoffman, Elsa Justel, Mathew Adkins, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, David Berezan, Manuella Blackburn, Hans Tutschku, Monique Jean et Theodore Lotis.

On vous parle pour la première fois du label Empreintes Digitales, et pourtant on en suit toutes les sorties avec une attention systématique. Pour comprendre cette confiance aveugle, il faut préciser que la structure est l’une des plus grandes références en matière d’électroacoustique mondiale. […] Et pour cause, Empreintes Digitales ne sort jamais de mauvais disque. Si on ne connait pas la moitié du quart des artistes présents sur la structure (à moins de vivre dans l’underground montréalais), tous ont en commun de justifier des curriculum vitae plus que pointus. Car Empreintes Digitales, c’est avant tout un rassemblement de mecs bardés de diplômes en composition électroacoustique. On est ici dans la frange «dure» du genre, celle qui fait la jonction entre les mathématiques appliquées et la stricte composition. Un catalogue qui peut paraître comme trop pieux pour les profanes, mais qui devrait attirer l’attention – si ce n’est déjà fait – des amateurs de risque contrôlés.

Enfin si on vous parle de tout cela, c’est parce que Monique Jean vient récemment d’apporter sa pierre à l’édifice, et de bien belle manière qui plus est. On la connait peu, pour ne pas dire pas du tout, mais ce qu’on entend sur les cinq longues pièces de Greffes nous suffit pour la considérer comme une pièce essentielle de l’échiquier canadien du genre électroacoustique. Rien que le Givre d’ouverture justifie à lui seul l’achat de ce DVD-Audio (ah oui, on a oublié de vous dire, la structure ne publie que sur ce format pour présenter ses travaux en configuration 5.1): magnifique monstre de dix-sept minutes qui joue sur les infrabasses, les balises signalétiques et les micro-fractures pour transcender d’une magnifique manière cette première étude rigoureuse du son.

On pourrait d’ailleurs croire à l’écoute de ce premier titre que Greffes annonce un disque de bon écolier, ce qui est finalement loin d’être le cas. Car les quatre titres qui suivent optent pour une voie bien plus audacieuse (même si la maîtrise de Givre n’a rien de péjoratif), voire casse-gueule. Guitares préparées, clarinettes et saxophones formeront tour à tour les bases de titres plus ou moins longs, assurant à cet ensemble des atours organiques virulents, parfois noise et déroutants.

Quoiqu’il en soit, derrière revient la même maîtrise, permanente malgré cette volonté de vouloir sortir d’une image trop scolaire. Un très bon disque, qui appelle sans cesse à la réécoute. Histoire de s’assurer qu’on n’en a pas fait le tour, que les interrogations sont là pour durer. Pour tous les amateurs de sonorités boisées.

Période apparamment propice aux premières parutions discographiques, le début 2013 nous amène sur les traces de Manuella Blackburn et ses Formes audibles. Marchant sur un sentier qui mène du bruitisme alla Gert-Jan Prins à l’électroacoustique de Iannis Xenakis, avec un net penchant pour le second, la compositrice de Manchester raye de son vocabulaire les notions de facilité et de colère. Pas foncièrement accessible au néophyte, son œuvre mérite plusieurs écoutes attentives avant de dévoiler ses saveurs, étrangement pernicieuses et sensuelles.

Although she has released pieces on compilations since 1995, Intérieurs harmoniques is composer Elizabeth Hoffman’s first full-length CD. It features six fine electroacoustic works realized at her New York City studio between 2001 and 2011, and mastered for this recording by Dominique Bassal. After listening to this CD it is clear that the composer is adept at juxtaposing separate timbral layers, related through various processing techniques, into kaleidoscopic collage forms. These pieces, unified through conceptual or abstract exploration, are firmly situated within the acousmatic tradition.

According to the composer’s liner notes, Resonants, the first piece in this collection, presents an “aural puzzle” in which the sounds “seem to be both activated and self-activating.” The listener is pulled between what she calls “reduced listening” and “source sound listening” (Pierre Schaeffer’s terms). I take reduced listening to mean a focused type of listening in which one notices subtle changes of timbre, as if listening to an object close-up. In Resonants one hears readily identifiable objects such as cymbals or bells, often manipulated via amplitude modulation. The collage form favored by the composer is one in which distinct material layers sound simultaneously in juxtaposition. For example, repeated groups of percussive sounds in the foreground are placed against a drone backdrop. But the effect is so much more than mere juxtaposition since Hoffman’s layers shift in and out of perceptual focus, which she achieves through careful changes of amplitude and spatial trajectory. Nothing is static in this piece. Sounds morph from one extreme timbre to another. This is evident when about a third of the way into the piece a low, rumbling timpani-like sound changes into a brittle swarm of insects. All of this culminates, at the golden section, into a poignant moment where a highly resonant, low-pitch drone comes into the foreground, followed by drum-like sounds that serve to mark this moment while also supplanting it. Resonants is a continuous, through-composed piece, though materials are obviously reused and transformed. During the last 40 seconds or so the texture finally thins out, revealing an intriguing palette of “timbral resonance.”

The second piece, Water Spirits, combines water and vocal sounds that are sonically transformed by algorithms created by the composer to modify microrhythmic and timbral details. The effect sounds very close to granular synthesis. According to Hoffman, the algorithms she uses “rearrange or eliminate data [to create] statistically accurate but temporally jumbled waveforms or sequentially accurate but incomplete waveforms.” Her description might imply a messy, inconsistent array of sounds, but this is not the case. Hoffman wants the listener to experience “a slightly askew tactility of otherwise familiar sounds.” She is largely successful in this endeavor, though the algorithms she uses work over her material without coming up with much that one might describe as novel or surprising. This might have occurred if she had submitted the water and vocal sounds to more variation, or combined them in a more timbrally unified manner such as one hears in many electroacoustic pieces by Paul Lansky. Also, one gets the sense that this piece would carry more tactile or visceral weight if heard in a concert setting on large and powerful speakers, which would allow the low frequencies she uses to literally move the listener’s body.

In Songstressed, one of the best pieces on this CD, Hoffman is unafraid to let her textures remain thin and transparent, implying more with less, if you will. The general pacing of events is relaxed and patient. Frequency bandwidths slowly come into focus and then dissipate, wavelike. Near the beginning of the piece there is a low, rumbling timbre that sounds as if one were listening to a chorus of voices slowed down and processed through a low-pass filter. From here, Hoffman gradually introduces birdsong and bird chatter, effectively spatialized via slow panning. The birdcall recordings she uses are amplitude-modulated to create a dynamic warbling effect, which is further manipulated through convolution reverb-like techniques. The overall sense of this piece is of a long build-up to something that never happens, not unlike what occurs in Samuel Beckett’s plays but on a much smaller time frame. The piece seems to end unexpectedly at 9:40, however—about a minute and a half before the actual end. At this point the composer allows the unprocessed birdsong to be heard intact, and then within long trails of resonance.

In D-ness Hoffman uses violin samples in order to explore the violin’s natural resonance characteristics. When I first heard this piece, a surreal image of D major pixies frolicking at a fiddler’s tailgating party came to mind. The composer describes D-ness as “exuberant” and “sunny.” Images and adjectives aside, this piece uses convolution reverb fed with effectively layered string attacks in sharp relief. The delicate, unsteady moments are the most effective, especially where the composer seems to use a fast, pulse-wave modulator to amplitude-modulate the violin materials, sounding as if you’re hearing these materials through a perforated wall in your cochlea. The piece ends with a long fade-out in which the sampled violin sound briefly makes an appearance in an unprocessed form.

Allamuchy, the fifth piece on this CD, begins with a thick, flanged frequency-modulation patch. Other materials carefully surround and interact with this primary timbral focus, palpably swirling around the listener as they are developed. The effect is filmic in scope and quite engaging. About halfway through the piece the composer shifts gears and introduces restless flapping and walking sounds, while continuing the swirling effect from the first half of the piece. About 1:45 from the end a slowed-down, crow-like sound is heard, juxtaposed with low-pass filtered noise, sounding not unlike a subway or ocean environment. The progression from a key-centered texture in the first half, to the noisecentered materials in the second half, is tangibly coherent.

In the final piece, Soundendipities, Hoffman wanted to convey in sound a “hyper-frenetic immobility.” The texture is supposed to “suggest an external world seen too close up for one to recognize any substances.” In this respect the beginning of the piece is promising. One hears a rich, timestretched, convolution-reverb drone texture with sounds that are largely unrecognizable. Various tremolo speeds and depths gradually enter and exit, each time threatening to destabilize the predominant texture. Timbres fade in and out while others remain in an undulating stasis. For the former, Hoffman creates some that sound like a randomized pinball machine. For the latter, she creates some elegant drones from comb-filtering techniques. This is the shortest piece on the CD, and one gets the sense that its length lends a certain kind of intensity, or event compression, that is not necessarily the case with some of the earlier pieces. As the piece fades out one is left with the feeling that it ends a little too early, creating a desire to hear more.

Hoffman favors organic development cast within a collage form. She seems less concerned with the smaller subtleties of timbre than with the big picture. The works on this disc, all between 9 and 14 minutes, tend to reveal their unprocessed sonic materials near the end, after they’ve been thoroughly processed and developed. After listening to this CD you’ll want to hear more by this composer.

Finally, a word about the CD’s packaging: The empreintes DIGITALes package seems a little slapdash, mostly due to the use of extrathin cardboard. In fact it’s so thin that the slightest pressure from the shrink-wrap distorts its square shape. Also, the CD itself is not housed in a tray card, but instead is partially contained in a haphazard half piece of folded cardboard that easily falls out, and is much more difficult to return to its original configuration. Nevertheless, the package features a nicely rendered, Chagall-like painting by Giles Lyon.

Du label québécois empreintes DIGITALes nous parviennent le plus souvent des déclinaisons électroacoustiques de belle tenue, une sympathique habitude que confirme À l’ombre des ondes du duo français Kristoff K.Roll. Telle une transition où des field recordings à la Chris Watson, magistralement enregistrés siouplait, s’imbriquent dans les interviews prenantes de quidams racontant leurs rêves (Brigitte Bardot, mission dans les marais ou copine arrosant les plantes), Carole Rieussec et J-Kristoff Camps virevoltent entre les genres. Parfois, le transfert explore des mots en mandarin, (très) majoritairement, la langue de France Culture est à l’honneur. Invités à la réception des deux pièces principales, chacune chronométrée un peu sous les 30 minutes, en sus de la bien plus courte deuxième plage, Luc Ferrari et Pierre Schaeffer doivent sacrément apprécier l’héritage, tapis dans l’ombre et oreilles discrètement ouvertes. À écouter impérativement au casque pour être hyper content.

Träume gehören niemandem, so Carole Rieussec und J-Kristoff Camps, Pariser Klangkünstlerpaar, in den Liner Notes ihres zweiten Albums fürs Flaggschiff-Label der Akusmatik. Schon bevor man das Album anhört, spürt man an ihrem Umgang mit dem brillianten, aber strengen Coverformat, dass man sich hier auf etwas Besonderes einlässt. Die Traumerzählungen, deren Aufnahmen diesen drei wunderschönen Klangspaziergängen Schwerpunkte verleihen, beweisen auch, dass Träume allen gehören: Man erkennt sich selbst in ihnen wieder (Französischkenntnisse vorausgesetzt). Dazu führen sie durch vielerlei Räume und Raumschichtungen, bevölkert von gedämpften Stimmen, Landschaftsaufnahmen, weichen Drones, folgt dabei unterschiedlichsten Bewegungen, Schrittgeräuschen, zuweilen brechen elektronische Verfremdungen die Zuordenbarkeit auf. Komponiert für Kopfhörer, dösend, gern an öffentlichen Plätzen, zielen Kristoff K.Roll mit ihrem Feuerwerk von Assoziationen auf losgelöste Sinnlichkeit und verkörpern dabei den natürlichen Zusammenhang von Luc Ferraris Erbe mit Halbschlaf-Musiken von Björks Vespertine über Rancho Relaxo zu DJ Olives Sleep-Serie und überhaupt einer experimentellen Nachtradio-Tradition. Interessant, wie Yannis Kyriakides jüngster Zugang auf dessen “Dreams” weit davon entfernt landet.