The title Mouvances-Métaphores covers two discs of music: Cycle de l’errance and Les Dérives du signe, seven pieces from the eighties all related by ideas of movement and change. (The word Métaphores is as literal, and as metaphorical, in French as it is in English. And both meanings are important for these pieces.)

The first piece of Cycle de l’errance, Points de Fuite, is a curious and curiously teasing sort of piece. First of all, while its points may indeed be said to vanish, as is true for any piece of music, it also provides material for the next two pieces of the cycle, giving it a literal kind of permanence at odds with its title. Second, it is inside a larger piece, Cycle de l’errance, which is itself inside of Mouvance-Métaphores, titles which might seem to account for those three rather odd little interruptions in its twelve minute span, first a passing car, next a train whistle, and last a jet plane. Seem to, but not really. Read more »

Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dhomont’s symphony is made up of bits and pieces. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dhomont’s symphony has a life of its own.

Unlike the monster, however, Dhomont’s symphony is graceful and lovely, all of its bits were used with the victims’ permission, and the surgery performed has left the pieces of which it has been made alive and well.

Nothing of Shelley’s story is presented here. The title refers solely to the surgical technique, although appropriately enough two of the pieces appropriated were Les corps éblouis (Christian Calon) and Spleen (Robert Normandeau).

Sewn together in 1997, the Frankenstein Symphony is in four movements: Allegro, Andante, Scherzo (Giocoso), and Finale.

The clip is from the opening of the Allegro. If you’re interested in the corpus from which this was taken, Gilles Gobeil’s Le vertige inconnu, there’s a clip at the electrocd site.

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Also, here’s a clip from Normandeau’s Spleen:

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The album …et autres utopies, which was released for Dhomont’s 80th birthday, contains all recent work—either new pieces or older ones reworked. Four of the five pieces on this disc—all but Voyage-miroir—were performed at the Akousma(3) festival on the day itself, 2 November 2006.

Here and There, which opened the concert, also opens this disc. “Here and There” is one of those laconically descriptive titles that manages to be accurate and uninformative at one and the same time. The music does explore how music exists in both space and time. And the materials are from here and there as well—watery sounds (modified to be hard-edged), a girl’s voice, footsteps, and so forth. But none of that really captures the restless and mercurial qualities of this fascinating piece. I guess only listening to it will do. [Jean-François Denis requested that we link to the electrocd site for their clips.] Read more »

Sous le regard d’un soleil soir is an electroacoustic melodrama, the first of Cycle des Profondeurs, which, along with Forêt profonde and the soon to be completed La cri du Choucas, takes its text from psychiatric writings, in this case the famous Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The ideas that have inspired each piece of this cycle are not only part of the piece but have been transmuted into musical ideas.

In Sous le regard d’un soleil soir, this is clearest in the kind of layering so easy and natural to tape music—any sound can be played simultaneously with any other sound; any sound can be played against itself, lined up exactly or offset. One voice can be saying various different things on several different tracks at once. This is most humorously—but seriously—done where a man says “I’m an individual” and “I’m an in divide you all” and also “I’m no one” and “I’m a no un.” This is followed by another man saying something about one’s inner self losing its identity and integrity, which is an uncomfortable thing to happen to a person, but a pleasant and positive thing to happen to a sound.

And so on. And as the “characters” talk about the real and the unreal, the outside and the inside, one finds oneself listening ever more carefully to the sounds of this piece, to the natural and artificial, to the strictly musical and to the voices talking—and ultimately unable, as it should be, to distinguish them in those ways.

Listen here to clips.

Forêt profonde continues the multiple and shifting meanings of Sous le regard d’un soleil soir, here using fairy tales and the writings on fairy tales of Bruno Bettleheim and even, in a one place, some text about Bettleheim and his incarceration in a prison camp. Profonde means deep physically—as in the place in the forest one is always warned in fairy tales not to go–as well as psychologically or philosophically, as in profound.

Everything about Forêt profonde is multiple, and shifting. The texts are in seven different languages, with the some expressions, like “Once upon a time,” given not only in different languages but in different forms in the same language (as in “Il était une fois” and “Il y a de cela mille ans ou plus”). And, of course, the music is, like fairy tales, alternately comforting and menacing.

I suppose one can say that, anyway. It all seems to me, just listening, to be profoundly beautiful and nothing else!

Clips here.

Randy Yau is the graphics designer responsible for the distinctive design that makes shopping for Ground Fault cds so easy and that makes owning them a visual treat as well as a sonic one. As R.H.Y. Yau, Randy is also a fiercely talented musician whose The Hidden Tongue is a sonic treat for sure. Sharp, bright, harsh eruptions of noise over what is mostly either fairly soft sounds (throbbing low frequencies) or small sounds much amplified over no sound at all. But that’s just the sounds, each of the eight “incidents” that make up The Hidden Tongue, from A to H, moves through time with the magnificent inevitability and energy of a tidal wave. Your ears will thank you for buying this excruciatingly glorious music.

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Although I can say that this is an entertaining album, I also have to confess that I don’t think I will listen to it all that often. While it won’t remind anyone of metal, I don’t think, it may be a kind of transition album for metal heads on a quest for pure noise. I only say that because Lockweld use repetitive patterns and a little of the kind of vocalisation a friend of mine—who has a lot of metal in his collection—calls the “cookie monster voice.” I don’t know. It has variety: loud, abrasive noise; strange combinations of tune and grit; transparent electroacoustic lines; techno riffs. But I’m not convinced that it adds up to anything worth listening to again and again. It seems like it should. Maybe it’s that Lockweld had not decided, in this album, what to do—and that that’s why it all sounds a little tentative. Maybe it’s that I had a bad morning and nothing would please me, not even Government Alpha.

Give it a listen, is all I can say, and judge for yourself. At their prices, the very worst Ground Fault is not much of a risk. And five years from now, who knows. This very album might be your favorite. Or mine. (N.B., you realize of course the absurdity of using a word like “worst” in the same sentence as “Ground Fault.”)

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Noise albums sometimes have a small dynamic range, presenting a loud wash of complex sounds, an opaque surface which first resists then rewards efforts to penetrate it. Psychoacoustics has a wide dynamic range, and each of its sounds are clearly distinguishable one from the other. That, and the sheer warmth and even softness of much of Psychoacoustics may make it an excellent album for introducing people to the noise world.

“At one extreme is the beauty that is associated with a sense of lightness and balanced order. It does have a faintly decorative quality to it. At the other extreme we have the much darker form of beauty that we associate with profundity and truth.” Although quoting liner notes is usually a chump’s game, this description is so apt, I couldn’t resist.

Whether Psychoacoustics will wear as well as some of the harsher and more uncompromising albums of Ground Fault remains to be seen. And who cares, anyway? In the mean time, even though there are a couple of places where there’s actually a tune (!), this is an engaging and entertaining album—after six or seven listenings, its interest for me has not flagged.

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When I first got this album, I couldn’t get past the opening few seconds. Those days seem far away and inconceivable now, as much as when Berio’s Visages was unlistenable, or even farther back, when Carter’s double concerto was a jumble of random noises. Now this album is one exhilarating pleasure after another. Less abrasive than Merzbow, not more, as I once feared. I hesitate to make generalizations. Some of Merzbow is less abrasive than Merzbow…

All and all, Sporatic Spectra is powerful stuff, as strong and elemental as a tidal wave or a monsoon, yet “clean and precise, like a surgeon’s scalpel,” which is producer Erik Hoffman’s mot juste. Come to think of it, elemental and precise precisely describes Sporatic Spectra.

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Afflux is Eric Cordier, Eric La Casa, and Jean-Luc Guionnet—all of them with other cds on Ground Fault, all of them very talented composer/performers. There are three tracks on this disc, and three men, but the pieces, so far as I can hear, do not reflect each individual. What happens here is one more instance of talented people, each with clearly discernable styles, working in tandem with other equally talented individuals to produce music that is clearly different from anything any of them do alone. Read more »