Gobeil plants his flag squarely in that electroacoustic continent where poetic dreams reside. The four-part Ombres, espaces, silences… commemorates the early Christian hermits who chose to live in deserts and other inhospitable venues. The work also visits music from the Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova. Be warned: Listeners anticipating transcendent choruses are likely to be frightened. Entre les deux rives du printemps, playing as it does with lines from the Paradise of Dante’s Divine Comedy, seems an appropriate successor to Ombres, notwithstanding its modernist mechanistical noises. Le miroir triste explores untreated scenes by Tarkovsky (Hoffmanniana) wherein E.T.A. Hoffmann (of Tales of Hoffmann fame) converses with Mozart’s Donna Anna. The Don Giovanni quotation is bound to surprise. Imaginative and resourceful, yes, but reassuring or calming? Seek elsewhere.

Dufort’s chartered tour is more like a night drive through the bad part of town. Several pieces convert mechanical and ambient sounds into noise, as in Grain de sable’s opening and the flashes that whip through Gen_3. Enfant d’obus (“Bomb child”) conjures destruction with shattering glass and spluttering fire. Grain de sable marks the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami that hit Thailand, with drowning as one of its themes. Dufort’s bewildering development of ideas occurs without apparent cohesion, as in the Matério_ trilogy, the parts of which appear to contemplate consistent sources — something squeaking, something dipped in water, something crunching, mechanical noises, etc. Dufort isn’t consistently apocalyptic, witness Gen_3’s humorous borrowings from, among others, Francis Dhomont, Pierre Henry and that venerably ancient, Billy Machaut. Hi_Res feels like a video game.

Wind and water provide the background for Lotis’ dreams. Most of the music operates in the treble range and uses precisely positioned pitched sounds, rarely with noise or distortion. Beneath the gauzy surface lies a complexity not immediately apparent. Arioso Dolente / Beethoven Op. 110 eventually reveals a piano; however, the piece’s subject is Beethoven’s disposition. The sinister edge of Sibylla’s Voice occurs by way of processed violin sounds simulating the sibyls’ grim pronouncements. The recent 2002 South Wind will Bring the Sand and Underwater Theories suggest that Lotis now prefers concealing complexities under smoothly changing surfaces. Without notes or title I wouldn’t have guessed that the two-part La mer is about the sea. Lotis manipulates bee sounds to simulate water in La mer’s first movement.