Over the past three or four years, I have had the privilege of hearing several of Gilles Gobeil’s pieces performed and diffused live in concert. His work has always impressed me for its exquisite craftsmanship and extraordinary attention to detail, the sheer interest of his raw materials and their juxtapositions and transformations. Nonetheless, I have always had a nagging suspicion that what I was hearing was not music — something interesting and provocative, but not music. In reviewing this CD, I have had to face this suspicion, and I have come to the startling conclusion that Mr. Gobeil is, in fact, not a composer at all, but a sculptor. He is a sculptor whose medium is sound, or rather, the sonic by products of mechanical events, which are the real subject. Indeed, Mr. Gobeil comes close to admitting this himself in the short note that accompanies the present recordings, in which he mentions his fascination with medieval stone work and the behavior of materials under stress, of, for example, a rock “on the verge of splitting apart… brought to its breaking point.” His source materials include all manner of mechanical bangings, screeches, sunderings, throbbings, and whistles, many of which contain a strongly repetitive element. It is this repetition that lies at the center of my assertlon.

Music is a temporal art. Fundamentally, the music of any style, in any historical period, serves to articulate the passage of time. We humans perceive the passage of time through that wonderful invention we call rhythm, which is also a form of cyclic repetition. What distinguishes human rhythm (and our own heartbeats) from mechanical repetition is that rhythm is always a deviation from the mechanical norm. It is the deviation from mechanical perfection that gives rhythm its ability to propel music forward in tirne, and it is the corresponding lack of any deviation that makes the ticking of a clock so static. It is not paradoxical to state that a clock cannot articulate time, it can only measure it.

Sculpture, in contradistinction to music, is about the articulation of space, light, and texture. Translate these domains into the sonic realm and the discussion revolves around space, reverberation, intensity, and timbre. These are the fundamental elements that Mr. Gobeil’s works manipulate. Hence, a piece such as La ville machine contains a strongly cinematic quality that is apprehended more visually than aurally. In fact, there is a very strong sense of place in all of the pieces on this CD, as though one is wandering through a world populated only by factories, garages, and railroad crossings. Fascinating, too, is the sense that the sound components of pieces like Le vertige inconnu and its cousin Nous sommes heureux de… are clearly related to one another, but in what way? We still have no adequate means of coherently describing complex timbral relationships. Perhaps sculptors like Mr. Gobeil can shed light where composers have stumbled.

I was frankly disappointed in the two works for Ondes Martenot, Voix blanche and Là où vont les nuages… not because they are lesser works than any of the others on this CD, but because the sound world of the Ondes Martenot integrates too well with that of the tape. Neither piece provides a contrast between the instrument and the tape, nor a soloistic focus — the Ondes Martenot is simply one more sound component, on a par with the others in the work. This is a pity, as the Ondes Martenot has an intriguing sound, and one would want to hear it in a setting that shows it off to better advantage.

Mr. Dolden has something that is rare and worth preserving: a unique and original point of view. He has sufficient craft and means to realize his point of view, and the results, for the most part, are compelling, and often quite beautiful. His manipulations of sound mass alone probably deserve their own chapter in electronic music texts of the next millennium. But there is a pervasive sense that he is rendered deaf by his own discourse, and that particular directions of the music’s flow have been chosen for discursive rather than musical reasons. For example, “…it is well known to any consumer of media music that in order to be considered artistic you have to have an African percussionist. (program notes)” And therefore, for no other reason, we have manifold layers of hand percussion. Are you being facetious, Mr. Dolden? I can’t tell, and it’s gratuitous either way. But let’s ignore that for now, and concentrate on the music. With the exception of the last work, Veils, which predates the others in this collection by seven or eight years, there is a unified aesthetic and technical approach that finds its best analogy in the huge, thick paintings of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Layers upon layers upon layers of sound produce an aural canvas in which individual details, if they are audible at all, are rendered inconsequential in the context of the huge gestures that emerge from the composite mass. This is not to say that Paul Dolden’s sound masses wallow in some amorphous homogeneity; rather, he is able to imbue each with a well articulated persona. Thus, in the best of the pieces for solo instrument and tape, a seeeing is created which one hears as a kind of extrapolation (a very long extrapolation) of the historical/social context of the solo instrument. For the cello piece, Physics of Seduction. Invocation #3, with its beautifully voiced C-major chords, the serting is the 19th-century cello concerto. For the saxophone piece, Revenge of the Repressed. Resonance #2, the setting alternates between swing jazz and the music of the French composers who explored the new instrument between approximately 1850 and 1910. For the electric guitar piece, Physics of Seduction. Invocation #1, the setting is ehe extended rock jam session from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The inclusion of the three-part work Veils in this collection is interesting because it affords us a glimpse into the evolution of Paul Dolden’s sound mass technitque. If the later works are Kiefer, then Veils is protoKeifer, tempered by a healthy dose of Rothko. Veils is about gradual transitions from one timbre/chord to another, and the masses that comprise it are not heard as masses at all, but as completely homogeneous entities. So, even though all the pieces on these two CDs employ the technique of superimposing hundreds of tracks of source recordings in the creation of the sound mass, the sustained nature of the source materials for Veils sharply distinguishes it from the much more active sources for the later pieces. To my mind, however, this work is far and away the most interesting of the four pieces for tape alone in this collection. Perhaps this is because it was apparently motivated by purely musical reasons (at least according to the program notes) — it is completely unencrusted by programmatic subtexts.

I should mention that all of the source materials for the pieces on these CDs are completely acoustic. There is no synthetic material, and extremely little processing. M. Dolden’s reliance on the computer is primarily for its editing capabilities and its ability to mix and bounce tracks hundreds of times without adding significant amounes of noise. Like any technique taken to a logical extreme, this use of the computer transcends the multi-tracking effects possible in the traditional analog studio. To wonder whether or not it qualifies as “computer music” is to miss the point.

Le compositeur montréalais Robert Normandeau a remporté le prix Golden Nica au concours international Prix Ars Electronica 96 qui avait lieu le 4 septembre dernier à Linz, en Autriche.

Cet honneur lui a été décerné pour sa pièce Le renard et la rose, une œuvre acousmatique (musique électroacoustique sur bande) composée en 1995. La pièce est une suite composée à partir de la musique commandée pour une adaptation radiophonique du conte Le petit prince d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry et des voix des comédien(nes) et animateurs(trices) qui ont collaboré à l’enregistrement de l’adaptation radiophonique.

Il est à noter que la pièce de Robert Normandeau était en compétition contre 287 autres compositions.

Amateurs de découvertes, vous allez être servis. L’insolite, l’original et le neuf sont ici au rendez-vous avec la plus grande efficacité et l’art dans ce qu’il a de plus attirant et gratifiant. Le Britannique Jonty Harrison nous emmène en voyage comme seul sait le faire un électroacousticien de haute-voltige. Murmures de cloches, bulles synthétiques, dialogues des sons de tout genres se répercutant d’un haut-parleur à l’autre, sont les artifices de son langage. C’est le degré un de la séduction, celui qui force la deuxième écoute. Alors, on entre dans un univers qui titille le cerveau, chatouille l’oreille, fascine le cœur et ravit l’auditeur.

Naturellement, il ne s’agit pas de musique d’atmosphère; il est question de sonorités mises en forme (et parfois déformées, quel bonheur) dans ce qu’elles ont de plus subtil et ténu. Le compositeur s’intéresse à une texture, à une couleur, la manipule, la fait voyager, lui associe quelques objets sonores qui la mettent en relief, lui font parcourir un itinéraire original et qui révèle un sens à la fois ludique et intelligent.

… et ainsi de suite… en est un bel exemple; pendant les vingt minutes de cette «suite», aucun moment d’ennui ni méme de lassitude. Si vous voulez apprivoiser la musique sur bande, c’est par là qu’il vous faut commencer. Harrison n’agresse pas, il séduit, et le charme britannique est irrésistible, vous le savez bien.

L’univers sonore est volontairement restreint. Cela permet de se repérer plus facilement et surtout de suivre le processus ou, plus justement, la surprise dans l’évolution des processus. Il ne faut pas confondre cette notion avec celle de procédé. Le procédé ennuie par sa répétitivité et la prévisibilité même avec laquelle un événement qui se voudrait surprise; le processus, lui, permet d’établir un réseau et de s’en écarter pour créer la véritable surprise, même nuancée et fine, et stimuler l’attention, donc, en musique, l’émotion.

Cette petite collection de perles rares arrive comme un bain de fraîcheur dans un univers qui parfois semble uniformément morne. C’est qu’au lieu de faire une démonstration savante de son esthétique, le compositeur s’adresse d’abord au côté inquisiteur de l’oreille, l’oreille qui cherche, curieuse. Et qui trouve! C’est cela le plus beau.

Petite anecdote cocasse et humoristique: on indique que ce disque est «produit au Québec, made in Canada». Comprenne ce qu’il veut qui le pourra.