electrocd

Review

François Couture, AllMusic, 15 novembre 2005

Two years after the release of Le contrat, Gilles Gobeil’s collaboration with René Lussier, Trilogie d’ondes features the composer coming back to the style we are used to: wide sonic gestures, sound paint thrown left and right by the bucket, doors slamming shut to separate noise from silence. Here, though, Gobeil manages to sound much less caricatured than on … dans le silence de la nuit… These three pieces are filled with subtle details and more nuanced dynamics. Most of all, they all feature Suzanne Binet-Audet, virtuoso of the Ondes Martenot. Maurice Martenot’s uncanny instrument combines the magnetic eeriness of the theremin with the practicality of the keyboard. It can do a lot more than the spooky suspense soundtrack lead lines it is best known for, as Binet-Audet majestically proves. Voix blanche (White Voice) and Là où vont les nuages… (Where Clouds Go) were originally written in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but the recordings presented here are fresh. The Ondes Martenot’s role is equal to the tape’s, the two parts intermingling in surprising ways. Composed a decade later, La perle et l’oubli (Pearl and Oblivion) comes closer to a cinema for the ear in which Binet-Audet’s instrument plays the lead character. Rich and skillful, this piece ranks among Gobeil’s most gripping and mature works. The Montréal label empreintes DIGITALes has released Trilogie d’ondes as a DVD with DVD-audio, DVD-video and DVD-rom partitions. In addition to the 48 kHz/24-bit stereo version, it also contains 320 kbps MP3’s of the three works and a 38-picture slide show capturing the ondes Martenot from every possible angle.

Rich and skillful… ranks among Gobeil’s most gripping and mature works.