The title invokes an ancient Chinese puzzle consisting of seven pieces: five triangles and two quadrilaterals. Together they form a square, but when separated the pieces can be rearranged into a myriad of possible formations. Like the tangram, the music on this album shifts, morphs, and fractalizes throughout its entirety. Like Bergson’s durée, there is no underlying constant — only continuous change. Every so often, I come across a recording that initiates a sense of becoming, in which each moment transforms the whole. The sounds on Tangram are not separated into isolated units, rather each sound carries the previous sounds with it, unfolding like a flow rather than a series of discreet events. “Have a nice trip” is the usual send-off, but in the tangram it’s redundant. The trip is always nice. […]

Monique Jean’s black thread terminates at a portal to the outside where an industrial tableau of gears, pulleys, springs, turbines, belts, and steam materializes. Here, in this world, natural organic life is sidelined. It’s there, somehow, subsisting in this place, in the margins, but look around; it’s all machine. Running hot during the day, cooler at night, this machine is self-replicating. An elevated viewpoint might expose its borders, but the borders are forever expanding. The viewpoint will be subsumed quickly. This machine breathes itself forward in all directions and upward until land is no more, life is no more, and atmosphere is swapped out for mech. Purpose forgotten, here, God is blacksmith. […]

This is the first of several releases on the great empreintes DIGITALes label. It is an album of quiet urgency, although it doesn’t begin that way. Sweeping, wide angle vistas, massive enough to see entire weather systems born, disperse, and die give way to dark liquid interiors. These internal places are explored with sound as a beacon, leading and lighting the way, but only dimly. There is a dark beauty stretched across these planes, like a black satin thread. A lifeline to the day world left behind. Keep it close; you may need it. […]

Similar to Monique Jean’s recording, this album explores a deeper nightside — one buried beneath the rubble of memory and habit. A small chaos brews, a quiet apocalypse, buried underground, spins and whirls, sending out circular ripples from below. Within this eternally dark space are memories wrought in movement. Most remain hidden — fleeting traces of activity that linger at the periphery. Some show themselves through motion, through dance. Turcotte taps into this nocturnal world, tracing systems of thought that may, or may not, surface. Much is held back, but what is shown, what surfaces, holds value beyond measure. Listen, you may be surprised. […]

Dominique Bassal (born Cairo, now living in Montréal) started out with an academic training, but cut his teeth in the commercial world as an engineer and studio genius working on various pop music productions, apparently applying avant-garde methods to these genres. He’s also something of a “house engineer” for this particular label, with multiple mastering credits to his name.

He has released his own compositions before, such as Ubiquité in 2009, but today declares he wishes to move beyond the “allegories” that used to characterise his early work. This new get-tough “tell it how it is” attitude is reflected in the title of this album and the six tracks which make direct reference to the rise of various historic dictators and or other instances of human rights abuses, taking in everything from the KKK to Rwanda, by way of the Deir Yassin massacre, Adolf Hitler, and even Joe McCarthy. “We have let a handful of hallucinated prophets convince us to turn the other cheek,” is his hard-hitting warning, “unsurprisingly, the psychopathic minority seized the opportunity to take control of the world.” Stirring words — and it doesn’t take much effort to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our contemporary global situation.

He’s also got some harsh words for the genre of modern electroacoustic music itself, which he regards as being driven by a “geek complex”, apologising for the generally poor music, and dismissing a large corpus of work as “infinite variations of the most insipid and predictable sonic material”. One problem might be that composers have simply forgotten how to communicate with an audience, deliberately draining their work of any emotional content or any element that might be mistaken for “story-telling”, in favour of the purity of abstraction. To hear Bassal’s attempt to redress this balance, tune into these six pieces, which contain plenty of exciting shifts in timbres, exotic spice and flavours, and near-cinematic grandeur in their narrative sweeps.

While I find myself caught up in the thrill of the moment more than once, I’m also feeling a slight sense of sprawl — no real beginning or end to these colourful lakes of sound. The emotional register throughout is somewhat gloomy and pessimistic, given the themes he has taken on, and while there’s much to admire in his feisty spirit, the actual music isn’t quite as incisive or forthright.

Les titres des trois pièces de ce recueil suggèrent l’idée d’un paysage sonore dévolu aux jardins — mais ici, point de jardin des délices, ni de jardin pharaonique, ni même de jardin privé. Et si ces trois titres semblent orienter l’auditeur vers trois environnements différents, il n’en est rien. Le titre de l’ensemble, c’est bien Du noir tout autour, et du noir, il y en a dans chacune des propositions: dans Black Garden forcément, mais aussi dans Empty Garden et Light Garden. Armando Balice, franco-italien, directeur et cofondateur (avec Livia Giovaninetti) d’une structure dédiée à l’acousmatique et aux arts sonores, Alcôme, réalise ici son premier enregistrement. Les titres de deux compilations antérieures auxquelles il participa confirment son obsession du noir: Mes yeux sont des flammes noires (Singularities, 2017), Le Crépuscule fané du phénix noir (Studio Forum, 2018). L’auteur traite l’obscurité comme une matière, une substance propre à chacun qui se doit d’être explorée. Silence et bruits, générés ou non (croassement de corbeaux, sons environnementaux, touches d’instabilité du violoncelle de Lola Malique) tissent dans la première pièce une toile interrompue par le noir. Empty Garden, tout en reprenant certains des éléments sonores de Black Garden, se veut plus inconfortable, hantée par le néant, matrice de la création, et parcourue de pas, de roulements, de déflagrations et d’emphase. Et la lumière du troisième volet, Light Garden pourrait être, en termes sonores, celle d’un Soulages… Le noir de l’étoile? Fracturation des sonorités synthétiques, effets d’orages, dislocation des sons, mais aussi un continuum plus apaisant, rythment ce dernier volet. L’ensemble est bien loin d’autoriser une écoute apaisée: c’est plutôt un sentiment trouble qui peut animer l’auditeur, sans doute en introspection.