These collages are like the obsessions that infiltrate dreams. Imagine, for example, that you have an epiphany about the beauty of photography. You spend the daytime taking photos or diving deep into the literature on lenses, shutter speeds, photographic film and aperture. And so sleep becomes an overspill for these incessant, excitable thoughts, twisted by the liberal logic of dreams. Shutters flutter outward like a startled bird flock, mechanisms whirr on either side… these sounds slosh from left to right, mimicking the movements of animals or draw bridges or hurricanes, conjuring an imaginary universe in which they exist as the only available building block. On Snap happy, the third track on Petites étincelles, cameras are everywhere. The compositions of Manuella Blackburn feel vital and thoroughly alive, imbued with her fascination for these noises and their charming twitches and intricacies, frenetic with the desire to drench the senses in more than can realistically be absorbed simultaneously.

Yet this is not chaos. I may be overwhelmed at points, yet even the most spectacular of eruptions feels adherent to a common direction. The pieces inflate to fill the entire stereo space with acoustic resonances, then fade into a light rain of ticking minute hands, then reduce to vertical spindles of plucked string, then stretch into tufts of ambient mist. At any given moment, the kinetic energy feels extreme. Spilling, tumbling, exploding. Time will tell often sounds like a cluster of grandfather clocks spontaneously combusting, with springs hurled through space; Ice breaker drowns me in tides of carbonated liquid, blinded by bubbles and the splashes of a thousand ice cubes. Yet to view these pieces from an aerial perspective would be to witness the narrative that assuredly tugs the bedlam forward, left, right, up, down. Even amidst the rapture of sonic obsession, Blackburn never loses sight of the overall shape, and just how the whirl of life can be perceived as grander arcs of age and steady change, so these collages allude to the prescient, symbiotic understanding that exists between the sounds that hurtle past each other.

Here’s someone who was born in the USA, now official inhabitant of France, but who refers to himself as a nomad. Although he dropped out of the conservatory, he taught at Ircam and now in Mons, Belgium. He creates music for loudspeakers and has a duo with Jean-François Laporte, called Rust and as Les Frères Bobine with Stefano Bassanese and with cellist Benjamin Carat as Fluid Identities. “He thinks that music is not a language but a lived visceral experience, and that is not the art of sound but the art of the transcendence of sound”.

On his CD we find seven pieces, four of Still (2007-2009) and three that make up Pulse (2010-2015). In the first one “all the sound are recordings of common objects, used without transformation; the only processes applied are equalization, compression and reverberation”. It is not easy to say what these common objects are. In the three of the four parts it sounds like wind blowing down pipes, along with some amplified string object, set up in a hollow, reverb setting and in the other the amplified sound of rubbing objects over carpet; a very subdued, low, bass like sound.

I thought these were great pieces, especially because they didn’t sound for a change like something on Empreintes Digitales; no endless amount granular synthesis here. On Pulse he uses the sounds of Buchla 200 Modular analogue synthesizer and it’s all about small fragments forever changing. This too is quite the different kind of music than we know from the label; it is much more an analogue feeling that we get from this piece of music, with the second part being a particular harsh one, even when more feedback like sounds are part of all three. Maybe this is Empreintes Digitales entering the domain of modular synthesizers? The third part of Pulse is a particular beautiful, shimmering piece of delicacy but also with that much needed edge that makes you sit up and listen closely. This was altogether an excellent release.