★empreintes DIGITALes

Annette Vande Gorne's 57-minute Haïkus (2016-20), five Japanese seasons in 17 short tableaux for 16 channels, where studio landscapes meet traces of Debussy, Vivaldi, Honegger, Messiaen and Jean-Michel Jarre, with tributes to Pierre Henry and Bernard Parmegiani.

Seven works by the Argentine composer Elsa Justel from 2001 to 2017, from radio pieces and a danceable electroacoustic tango to commissions for the GRM and Musiques & Recherches, and Yegl, a lost file haunting everyday machines.

A 49-minute work in nine movements by Chantal Dumas, commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and premiered in 2018, on the undulating motions of the Earth: earthquakes, mantle convection, geysers, earth tides, geomagnetism and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Five acousmatic works by Stéphane Roy from 2008 to 2019, from the hurtling machine pulse of Train d’enfer to Les aurores pourpres, shaped with an infrared hand sensor from sound banks he made at Stanford in the early 1990s.

Five field-recording based works by Annie Mahtani from 2008 to 2019: the Black Country Living Museum, Amazon nights from the Mamori Sound Project, thousands of ice sculptures by Néle Azevedo, wind in the Cheviot Hills, and a piece for her sister.

Eight works by Nikos Stavropoulos from 2003 to 2017 on intimate, close-up acoustic space, several conceived in 5.1 or ambisonics, among them Topophilia, Karst Grotto and Granicus, written for percussionist Alexander Pepelasis, who plays it here.

The first album by the Lausanne-born, Brussels-based Sophie Delafontaine: six acousmatic works from 2013 to 2018 drawing on Hesiod, Ovid’s Echo, the Jura cliffs of Creux-du-Van and the spiral spring at the heart of a watch.

Eight acousmatic works by James Andean from 2010 to 2018, mostly made in Helsinki: sounds from Luc Ferrari's archives, Maria Callas as Medea, a refrigerator in a Greek monastery, the inside of a piano and a garbled recording of John Cage.

Six acousmatic works by Belgian composer Todor Todoroff from 1991 to 2017, from the quadraphonic Baudelaire piece Obsession and a computer-simulated pendulum to Requiem for a City, written after the Paris attacks of November 2015.

Seven fixed-medium works from 1998 to 2013 by Glasgow-based Alistair MacDonald, arranged as a cabinet of curiosities: Glasgow streets, Carrie Fertig's glass instruments, a tribute to Delia Derbyshire, building bricks and the jungle explored by Alfred Russel Wallace.

David Berezan’s Nautical Cycle, five multichannel acousmatic pieces from 2011 to 2017 built from sea buoys, unmanned light vessels, mooring chains in Visby harbour and the bass clarinet of Marij van Gorkom, including the Klang ! first prize winner Lightvessels.

Three fixed-media works by eRikm from 2013 to 2016: an Icelandic crossing built around a folk tale, New Year’s Eve fireworks on a Berlin street, and a fire-retardant scar on the hills above Marseille, with a text by psychiatrist Georges Yoram Federmann.

Two long works by Monique Jean: T.A.G. (2013), mostly synthesized sound shaped by crowds of demonstrators, and Out of Joint (2009-11), a hybrid of Shakespeare's Macbeth and the films, stagings and rewrites it inspired, mastered by Christian Bouchard.

Six acousmatic works by Adam Stanović from 2015 to 2017, made mostly in Sheffield: a remix that lost its source, a parody of the metal-sound cliché, traffic around an old steel furnace, and a birthday homage to Beatriz Ferreyra.

Four stereo works by Åke Parmerud from 1990 to 1995, led by Grains of Voices, a 31-minute piece built from voices he recorded while travelling around the world and premiered at the United Nations in 1997.

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.

Two multi-part Ina-GRM commissions by Benjamin Thigpen made in Visby, Stockholm and Paris: still (2007-09), built from untransformed recordings of common objects, and pulse (2010-15), made entirely on a Buchla 200 modular synthesizer.

Five electroacoustic works by Horacio Vaggione, from newest to oldest: GRM, ZKM and Bourges commissions built on transformed piano and violin sounds, back to Fractal C, made in 1983-84 at Ircam on a VAX 780 from a fractal Cantor set model.

Five acousmatic works by Manuella Blackburn from 2012 to 2017, built from tiny sounds: cracking ice, camera shutters, clock ticks from a London museum, and sitar and sarod recorded with Indian musicians of Milapfest in Liverpool.

Annette Vande Gorne’s spatialized electroacoustic opera on a libretto by the poet Werner Lambersy, realized 2006-12: a condor against a bull in an Andean village, told through studio-recorded and transformed voices in 7.1 channels. Blu-ray audio.

Paul Dolden’s maximalist take on ancient myths and tuning systems, 2012 to 2016: the five-movement Music of Another Present Era plus two pieces for soloist and tape with guitarist Maurizio Grandinetti and trumpeter Łukasz Gothszalk.

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.

James O’Callaghan’s debut on empreintes DIGITALes: a trilogy of acousmatic works from 2013 to 2015 that treat a piano, a guitar, a toy piano and a string quartet as resonant spaces, plus Isomorphic. Opus Prize album of the year 2016-17.

Two large multichannel works by Jonty Harrison from 2014 and 2015, built on 25 years of field recordings from train stations, glaciers, rainforests and markets, here in stereo Ambisonic UHJ encodings made by Joseph Anderson in Seattle.

Francis Dhomont’s 70-minute electroacoustic melodrama on Franz Kafka, conceived in 1997 and completed in 2014-15, closing his Cycle des profondeurs, with Kafka’s texts newly translated by the composer and voices including Marthe Robert and Annette Vande Gorne.

Lepidoptera, a five-movement work for recorders and electronics by Monty Adkins and Terri Hron from 2014-15, named after families of butterflies, moths and dragonflies, with every electronic sound drawn from a Renaissance-style recorder consort played by Hron.

Four multichannel works by Åke Parmerud from 2005 to 2011, commissioned by the GRM, IMEB and ZKM: a blind person’s dreams, the crystal glasses of his parents’ parties, four voices from around the world, and a catacomb of decaying masterpieces.

Six works Gilles Gobeil made between 2008 and 2013 in Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Stockholm and Montréal, remixed in 2015: sounds from Folkmar Hein's apartment, a Hesse-inspired tribute to musique concrète, Virgil's Sibyl, Meyrink's Golem and a homage to Liszt.

Six acousmatic works by Georges Forget from 2007 to 2014, each prefaced by a text: a city falling asleep, a war piece after Ernst Jünger and Terrence Malick, and a long sea piece under Melville where a little girl sings to the ocean.

Three 16-channel works by Hans Tutschku from 2010 to 2014, mixed to stereo in 2015: a sleepless night under the stars, the old pianos in a hallway of the University of Cologne, and Issho ni, a half-hour ritual of folksongs, lullabies and prayers.

Five works by Åke Parmerud from 2004 to 2015 that push acousmatic music towards techno, noise and metal: machine sounds, a vinyl crackle piece for the ZKM Klangdom, New Zealand birds, and a choir of four metal growlers.

Four long surround works by Adrian Moore from 2012 to 2014: the paired The Battle and Counterattack, Nebula Sequence, begun on a strike day and with ball bearings after Bayle, and Strings and Tropes, on zheng samples by Sun Zhuo.

Six 7.1-channel works by Dominique Bassal from 2012 to 2014, dark acousmatic fables about spy dolls, the Roman frontier, Babylon and Baghdad, and greenhouse gases, in 7.1, 5.1 and stereo mixes at 96 kHz. Blu-ray audio.

Five works by Swedish composer Erik Nyström from 2008 to 2012, four of them first conceived for eight channels: dense, evolving textures of particles, clouds and drones drawn from his research with Denis Smalley on spatial texture and form that grows on its own.

Five works by Robert Normandeau from 2005 to 2014, several conceived for loudspeaker domes, from Karlsruhe trams and church bells in Kuppel to Baobabs, a Little Prince piece for four voices and the percussion group Sixtrum that won at Musica Nova 2013.

Six acousmatic works by Elizabeth Anderson from 1994 to 2014, mostly octophonic, from the voices of eighteen languages recorded for the Nazi fortress of Mimoyecques to sonified solar winds and a tesseract taken from A Wrinkle in Time.

Eight works by Roxanne Turcotte from 2009 to 2014, fixed media alone or with melodicas, narrator, guitars, shakuhachi and piano, from a bird and animal bestiary to field recordings of the 2012 Maple Spring protests in Montréal.

Six acousmatic works by Andrew Lewis from 1987 to 2013, from Lexicon, built on a 12-year-old’s poem about dyslexia, and Dark Glass, made from breaking panes, to the Bourges prizewinners Ascent and Time and Fire and the Welsh portrait Cân.

Five mixed works by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay from 2008 to 2013 for soloist, live processing and tape, with Sarah Nicolls on piano and Baschet-Malbos piano, Heather Roche, Peyee Chen and Jean-François Laporte on his Babel table.

Five multichannel works by David Berezan from 2008 to 2011, each rooted in a place or a single sound: sea buoys, a Balinese thumb piano, the Alberta Badlands, the Galungan festival in Ubud and the nightingale floors of Nijō Castle.