Canadian mp-based experimental imprint No Type release their first 2CD set and it’s truly an invigorating thing to behold. 36 tracks are crammed into the lush cardboard package each pushing the boundaries of their chosen form in clever and inventive ways. The dominating forces are those of noise and experimental electronica but pretty beats and even guitars are not ignored. There is an excitement in the sheer variety presented but further in the skill of execution — kalx’s Couf being a brilliant case in point. As tempting as it is to dismiss this challenging music as ‘not for everybody’ well why the hell not?

Après quatre ans d’expérimentation sur le Web, No Type, une étiquette de musique électlonique avant-gardiste qui se spécialise dans les MP3, sort de l’ombre. Porté à boût de bras par le jeune David Turgeon, le projet notype.com rassemble une communauté d’artistes hors normes et prolifiques qui viennent de publier leurs premiers disques compacts. C’est du solide.

Il y a quatre ans, bien avant que le tsunami des MP3 ne déferle sur le continent, David Turgeon, de Québec, faisait déjà partie de ceux qui croyaient en ce format, si bien qu’il fonde sur le Web notype.com, une étiquette virtuelle de disques 100% virtuels… De Montréal, où il vit maintenant, David Turgeon heberge les œuvres de 70 projets et artistes différents. Ceux-ci exposent leurs «albums», des pages Web artistiques qui étalent des sélections de chansons et de pièces, classées selon toutes sortes de concepts, allant de la propagande anti-McDonald aux essais graphiques, simples et complexes. Tout ça, sous format MP3 et téléchargeable gratuitement. «J’aime que nos univers se recoupent, dans ce côté minimaliste, un peu naïf.»

Quand vient le temps d’expliquer notype.com, David Turgeon parle d’un «repaire de magiciens du son réputés trop louches pour l’industrie du disque. No Type a contribué à lancer des musiciens tels que Tomas Jirku, Books On Tape, Dick Richards, Claudia Bonarelli et Headphone Science», dit-il. «Le site est une collectivité orsanisée, un espace où les artistes peuvent partager leurs créstions», poursuit David Turgeon. Grâce à la collaboration de DIFFUSION i MéDIA, pilier important de la communauté électroacoustique et expérimentale du Québec, le label No Type se lance dans l’impression de «vrais» disques en faisant son entrée dans le catalogue de DIFFUSION i MéDIA, qui produit également les disques de l’étiquette empreintes DIGITALes. Tout comme la plupart des disques produits et imprimés par cette dernière, les disques de No Type ont aussi droit au traitement «i MéDIA», qui se distingue avec ses pochettes artisanales, un peu fragiles, mais ingénieuses.

Contrairement à la plupart des artistes qui côtoient DIFFUSION i MéDIA, No Type, en disque comme en MP3, n’explore pas l’électroacoustique, mais plutôt l’électronique expérimentale, le «glitch», le «noise» et toutes autres expériences de laboratoire tripatives qui plaisent aux oreilles de David Turgeon. De Magali Babin (Chemin de fer) à Oeuf Korreckt (Podweek), en passant par le projet morceaux_de_machines (liberum arbitrium) et une compilation d’artistes internationaux et québécois (The Freest of Radicals), le jeune directeur artistique a jugé bon d’enregistrer ceux qu’il préfère: «c’est difficile de définir mes critères, je penche pour ceux qui démontrent un certain sérieux dans leur démarche et qui s’impliquent beaucoup», raconte-t-il. En fait, s’il est soucieux d’une chose, c’est de ne respecter aucune règle de genre, en évitant autant que possible de sombrer dans le nombrilisme.

La tribu de No Type est composée de musiciens de Montréal, Québec, Vancouver, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco et Saskatoon! Comme pour n’importe quelle étiquette qui se respecte, David Turgeon se permet de faire une sélection des gens qu’il veut voir évoluer dans sa communauté, en leur donnant les «clés» du site. Le site est gratuit et ne rapporte pas d’argent aux artistes qui y participent. David Turgeon n’ouvre tout de même pas les vannes à n’importe qui.

David Turgeon ne s’assoit pas sur ses lauriers, depuis la publication de ses quatre premiers CD. Il planifie déjà le lancement de trois disques vinyles de 12 pouces, destinés aux DJs intéressés à faire tourner la musique des artistes Books On Tape, Headphone Science et Claudia Bonarelli dans leurs «sets», d’ici la fin de l’été. Un autre disque compact est également prévu pour le groupe de Baltimore, themoonstealingproject, en novembre. On a déjà hâte d’entendre la suite!

After three years of internet-only activity as a mp3 label, the Montréal-based No Type decided to take the plunge into the physical world of CD edition. Released in April 2002, The Freest of Radicals launched the catalog. This 2-CD compilation album offers quite a few mouthfuls: 36 tracks from 34 artists, for a total of 155 minutes — too much for most listeners to absorb in one session. Most of these artists are known only to the people that frequented the label’s website, but fame has nothing to do with quality and the label proves it once again. From sound art and experimental electronica up to IDM, minimal techno, techno-lounge and more melodic material, the album takes us on quite a wild ride (including an unexpected stop into post-rock with Kanovanik). Highlights are just too numerous to mention, especially since every listener will have his or her favorites. Let’s just drop a few names: Tomas Jirku, Magali Babin, Ja_dijiste, Books on Tape, Infoslut, and so many others. The quality of the selections compensate for the somewhat dizzying scope of styles covered. The weirdest tracks often end up to be the best and discoveries await by the dozen. The fact that No Type adopted the highly original package design of the electroacoustic label empreintes DIGITALes is icing on the cake. Its pretentious title notwithstanding, The Freest of Radicals offers a panoramic view of things to come in electronica.

Well, well, well… This is a grand start of something… the something being the commercial CD releases on the No Type label, formerly a strictly on-line, downloadable venture. The grand opening with a packed and crammed double CD compilation of serious sound hang-ups is interesting enough, featuring a good scope of “free radicals”…

The basis for this joyous event might be found in the introductory text that No Type offers the hungry reviewers: The Freest of Radicals, through its varied and challenging musical landscape, shatters the hidden face of the recording industry, which too often ignores unconventional artistic developments and hinders so called ‘difficult’ music.” Indeed the free-flowing under-current of the present has to find its river channel, and the force is so immense just below the surface of contemporeana that it always does, and in this case the river channel is the label No Type and its benevolent benefactor Jean-François Denis, who already set the ultimate lofty standard of electroacoustic creativity and diffusion through the legendary label empreintes DIGITALes and the distributor DIFFUSION i MéDIA.

I’ll give a few impressions of some of the many entries provided. They’re picked out randomly, and not pertaining to any artistic or other preferences, which means that those not mentioned may be as relevant and urgently in need of ears as the ones actually touched upon.

Le chien borgne is a pseudonym for Guillaume Théroux-Rancourt, who originates in Québec City. His piece, mysteriously titled rho < 1 (rho a > rho), has been honored as an opener of the whole set. He is said to work with analog ambient loops, and there is nothing here that contradicts that. A deep, repetitious – calm! – rumble shakes your loudspeakers, sort of in a breathing manner, on top of which more lightly pitched layers are applied as with a stroke of a sable’s hair brush, all in all transposing the here and now into a dreamy, soaring, thoughtful state of arms stretched out in a hovering gesture towards an elusive horizon. I like this a lot; it has a peculiar magic to it – and I like to float in this liquid atmosphere a long time.

James Schidlowsky’s Radio Collision sweeps in helicopterish and duck-worthy, dominating the scenery completely, having you flung yourself in the mountain-birch bushes, torn madly by the magnum-force winds from the hovering machine, spinning slowly around, keeping any intent secret, and all you can do is wait… The massive layer – or rather wall – of gray sound is compiled of many timbres, some in the sub-spaces, some on high, and eerie fragments of torn messages might be sensed inside this wild but harnessed energy. Dense!

Tomas Jirku’s I Think I’m In Love addresses totally different aspects of the audios, one might say. This is a funkster prankster hopscotch rendition of rhythm and glassy timbral percussion; very beautiful, and somehow… alien; alien like little spheres of undetermined properties bopping and popping in thin-shrilled erotic dances across yellow plains of distant worlds in forlorn galaxies beyond our present scientific perception. Jirku’s hectic, yet precise, humdrum plum-picking audio has a shine to it that pleases! It is for long, hypnotic stays, though, and this short sample just gives you an idea of the trances you might encounter on prolonged visits in these worlds.

Cal Crawford doesn’t waste any time surprising the listener with what at first appears to be static and interference; something is wrong with your equipment… but as it keeps up you realize that this is it; Crawford’s artistic idea! Of course this isn’t new. It has been done numerous times since the late 1940s, in various fashions, but since the preceding works on this CD have been – one way or another – modal, this sharp, diamond-like, pointillist approach cuts it’s way through your listening like a surgeon’s scalpel, and it hurts nicely! His piece is called An Objection That is Immaterial After the Fact. It’s like dashing through the celestial night at warp speed, encountering scattered star matter across the void, or like managing a subterranean water tank perforated by neutrino; in any case, it’s fast, sparse, sharp, scattered – and perhaps not so healthy… Towards the latter part of the piece things dense up, as a rippling prayer bead of free flowing thoughts and impressions rush on down, with a murmuring backdrop of serious gestures. Even later on events get loud, like a closely miked forest fire caught at the precise location of a fiery tree stump furnace… Very ingenious electroacoustics!

Julie Rousse lends her electroacoustic voice to the little ones hiding in the semi-conductors and the closed circuits, where they huddle up around their innermost thoughts and dreams, little Terry Rileys of streaming electron organs dappling with the clouds of 1950’s Dylan Thomases on the horizons of electric wiring in Rousse’s piece Une à six idées improvisées. So short is Julie Rousse’s bell-tingling elves-gleaning that I instantly long for more… So many secrets of the little ones of electricity in this piece; a work worthy of the secretive Hattifatteners of the Moomin Valley!

Magali Babin has recently issued her solo debut on No Type, and this bit – Petit jardin – can be found on that CD as well. It’s French, detailed, microscopic, tingling, trickling and seeping… as little elves and fairies hover in the shadows over at the garden pond – and it makes me recall some worlds by Finnish guru electroacoustician Kaija Saariaho. There is a fair amount of deep wood enchantment in Finnish culture, you bet, and this property shines and shivers inside Petit jardin. Masterly, how Babin builds this dense atmosphere with sparse means in but a few minutes!

Claudia Bonarelli lives in Sweden, but her name is Italian. They Use Us Back is a strangely recognizable artifact, i.e., it seems to be… There are a number of musical clichés in here, used on the razor’s edge between the morbid and the pretentious, but it’s done with a swagger and a jerkily moving hip across the silver screen. You get a beat, you get two… and some sarcastically (?) applied modal strokes of the hand and taps of the fingertips. It’s so soft it could well be used for toothpaste commercials…

Jon Vaughn’s Bouncing Ball (1 of 2) + Gravel Road is a frantic experience to which I’ve taken a definite liking. I’ll put it on a loud repeat while fixing coffee! It has beat and insanity and beautifully scraping, vibrating sounds on top of a dump truck of humor, which is exactly what creativity needs to be bearable… Keep on keeping on, Mr. Vaughn, we’re sitting tight over in Swedenland at Sonoloco, keeping you on loud repeats! This music twists and turns to get out of that straitjacket of existence, crawling along under barbed wire on muddy elbows, heading for a smashing oblivion! Wow!

I’ll halt here, even though I haven’t even gotten around to the second CD yet, but I’m sure these samples will serve the purpose of conveying my deep and sincere lust for this music, as well as my admiration at all this ingenuity and sonic liveliness! The concept is wonderful, the result shining, and we’ll just have to keep the good spirits up so that these kinds of ventures can bloom and flower up ahead!

No Type, David Turgeon’s Montréal-based Net-only label with 67 ‘releases’ posted in the past four years, hits aluminium with The Freest of Radicals (IMNT 0201/02). True to No Type’s range, there are plenty of sounds to captivate and confound spread across the two platters, cleverly titled “bait disc” and “switch disc”. “Bait” presents the groovier stuff: distressed techno (Eucci’s Baribizon & Tape), Viratone Ballad’s drum & baste, and developmentally challenged hip-hop of Tomas Jirku’s I Think I’m In Love. There’s also beatless sound and noise, like Magali Babin’s Petit jardin, or 833-45’s blistering Spook, a prickly analogue critter in the vein of Pan Sonic. Napalm Jazz’s De la viande bio sticks to a relatively conventional IDM template — to exquisite effect. “Switch” offers a more understated approach, via drones, simmering whines and Ambient rumble from artists like Oeuf Korrekt, Diablamatomica, Chris Degiere and Alphacat. The common wisdom about the internet being the music industry’s great promotional device is overturned here: as a primer for notype.com, it’s a handy guide for navigating the label’s roster. Happy mousing.

It begins with a distant rumbling, like an earthmover firing up its large engines on the other side of the hill, the ground shaking slightly as the pistons start to move. This is Le Chien Borgne’s offering to the first No Type CD. Titled rho < 1 (rho a > rho), it drifts and rumbles, squeaks and threatens to have some rhythm, but never really becomes anything other than an environment. Welcome to the inscrutable sound of No Type.

Founded in October of 1998, No Type was a child of the Internet — its product only available as downloadable MP3 files — and it trafficked in the digital. Over the next half-decade, No Type created a venue for aspiring digital artists to link their sounds and music with an eager digitally-aware audience. They did glitch; they did click ’n cut; they did microwave; they did electroacoustic; they did minimal techno; they did experiments with radio transmissions bounced off satellites; they found more life in the little “1” and “0” than anyone thought there could be. And to celebrate: they’ve gone physical.

Teaming up with DIFFUSION i MéDIA, No Type is now releasing CDs — honest to goodness put it in your car stereo and think your car is about to fall about from the sounds that are coming out of your speakers kind of real discs. They’re starting you off with a two-CD set that encapsulates where No Type has been. Or, more appropriately, what sort of boundaries they don’t bother keeping to.

The Freest of Radicals offers 36 tracks across the two discs and has a little something for everyone. It starts with the beatless atmosphere of Le Chien Borgne, wanders into a chamber where Tomas Jirku demonstrates his minimal techno rhythms for you. Speech.fake explores the realm of micro-tonal glitch with their clinically titled An Objection That is Immaterial After the Fact. Julie Rousse offers a very 4’33” sort of vision with her Une à six idées improvisées. Viratone Ballad breaks in on Eucci with their track, ouet3c-warm, making me think for a minute and 48 seconds that something in either my spleen or my speakers has ruptured. Napalm Jazz and Backstreet Noise deliver two tracks that perfectly fit their names. Oeuf Korreckt finds a way to generate a near pop song from a piece of outdated machinery, further demonstrating that sound and music can be found anywhere. Dick Richards does Berlin style minimal dub though he thoroughly coats his tweaks and notes with yet another layer of water dub before stuttering everything back at you. Chris Degiere demonstrates how random and chaotic generative systems have more appeal than anything found on a recent Autechre album. Speaking of IDM, Headphone Science’s Without Paper Basics is as good as anything off Warp or Rephlex in the last year. Alphacat offers Waveporn which is a soundtrack to a six minute film of modest neu-electro machine dance porn.

It’s adventurous and experimental, and if you have the least curiosity as to what is being done in the realm of digital music, you should snap up this collection. Some of it makes me move, some of it make me flinch, some of it I can’t really hear over the sound of my computer or the traffic on the road outside, some of it makes me wonder if my stereo is about to explode and some of it makes me wonder what color the inside of a melody would have, but all of it makes me wonder how and why music can be heard. And, I think, that is all David Turgeon intended when he founded No Type back in 1998: to challenge our understanding of what is music and what is sound. He and the artists represented by The Freest of Radicals are not working to make pop songs, they are endeavoring to make you stop and consider what you hear.

And, for the love of static in your speakers, get yourself to their website. There are only 155 minutes of sound on these two discs. Hundreds more minutes await you at notype.com.