Music from Canada

Six works from 1986 to 1994 in which Yves Daoust turns everyday sounds and borrowed classics into music: Chopin recorded note by note, Schubert under Radio-Canada archives, Montréal church bells and dripping icicles.

Yves Daoust's 1991 disc of works built on fragments of the classical repertoire: pieces for piano, flute and accordion with tape on the theme of the performer's solitude, a baroque suite for a harpsichordist-actress, and the Bourges-winning Quatuor.

Yves Daoust's portrait of Montréal through its noise, the three-part Bruits (1997-2001), with Impromptu 2 on Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu, the 1981 analog-synthesis piece La gamme and Ouverture, a GMEB commission on Québec history.

The Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Giuffre, clarinet; Paul Bley, piano; Steve Swallow, double bass): the 1961 Verve albums Fusion and Thesis, recorded in New York in March and August 1961, plus unissued pieces, remixed by ECM in 1990.

A theremin controls a MIDI interface that manipulates several sound sculptures. The results range from abstract atmospheres to heavy low-frequencies and driving rhythm, with nary a dull moment. Long piano strings are beaten senseless by metallic strikers while water droplets fall in rhythmic patterns onto amplified percussive plates suspended above the ground, blurring the borders between the electronic and the organic. This piece, which had its premiere at the 2003 Open Ears Festival, is, in th…

This release is the first of three discs that C3R is slated to release by Gordon Monahan, and represents his first release in fourteen years. This CD is a re-release of two of Monahan’s best-known early works: ‘Piano Mechanics’ (which won first prize at the 1984 CBC Young Composers Competition), and ‘Speaker Swinging’ (his universally acclaimed, manually-operated sound installation). Both of these remastered pieces are awe-inspiring sound experimentations, possessing a visceral quality th…

Paul Bley's 1971 ECM album of three Annette Peacock compositions, recorded by two piano trios in New York in March and July 1967, with Barry Altschul on drums and Gary Peacock or Mark Levinson on bass.

Solo piano concert by Paul Bley, four of his own compositions and Sonny Rollins's Pent-Up House as encore. Recorded live in August 2008 at Kulturkirken Jakob during the Oslo Jazz Festival by Jan Erik Kongshaug; produced by Manfred Eicher.

Four acousmatic works by Christian Bouchard from 1997 to 2003: crowds, parades and a friend caught in a blind spot in Angle mort, three soundscape miniatures, and the two Parcelles, sounds of the world recorded and asked to pose.

Free improvisations by Paul Bley (piano), Evan Parker (tenor and soprano saxophones) and Barre Phillips (double bass), the first recorded Bley/Parker meeting. Recorded January 1994 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, produced by Steve Lake. ECM 1537, 1995.

Free improvisation session by Paul Bley (piano), Gary Peacock (bass), Tony Oxley (drums) and John Surman (baritone saxophone, bass clarinet), recorded September 1991 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, produced by Manfred Eicher. ECM 1488, released 1993.

Quartet album led by John Surman (baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet) with Paul Bley (piano), Gary Peacock (bass) and Tony Oxley (drums), recorded in September 1991 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, produced by Manfred Eicher. ECM 1463, 1992.

Ana Dall’Ara-Majek’s acousmatic cycle on insects, mites and bacteria, five pieces from 2012 to 2017 mostly made for 16 channels: a house cricket’s blues, mites on vine leaves, polyphony as bacterial colony, and a carpenter bee among twenty doors in Belgium.

Christian Bouchard’s 58-minute soundtrack for Derek Besant’s touring exhibition on cities torn up by redevelopment, twelve sections named after material-science terms, mixing soundscape, glitch and acousmatic writing; made in 2011-13 and remixed in 2016.

Yves Daoust’s Chorals ornés, a rereading of the 14 chorales of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein for organ and fixed medium with Régis Rousseau on a 1961 Beckerath organ and Québec poems, plus three works from 2002-05 on time, voice and found objects. DVD-Audio.

Christian Bouchard’s works from 2006 to 2010 between acousmatics, glitch and soundscape: the Impasto triptych after the frenzied painting of Pollock, Riopelle and Shiraga, the MIDI-driven Parcelles 21 and a requiem for Montréal’s mechanical parking meters. DVD-Audio.