Roxanne Turcotte spins an impressionistic love story with voices, sound effects, samples and rhythms, based upon Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse. Newcomers to electroacoustic music may find Amore particularly appealing; it uses many identifiable, untreated “real world” sounds and employs a more structured, linear narrative than other empreintes DIGITALes releases, grounding even its most experimental moments in comforting familiarity. It’s still a lot of fun—especially the conversational T’es le fun téléphone.

Roxanne Turcotte’s activities are diversified, to say the least. Yet, even with a resume that includes a keyboardist role in a rock group, electroacoustic composer and children music composer, she barely made a dent in the music world. Her first album, Amore, was released in 1994.

Born in Montréal in 1960, Turcotte always stayed in the big city. First and foremost a keyboardist, she began in rock and jazz groups, recording an LP with Kaméléon in 1982. Not shy of genre crossings, she entered the Master program in electroacoustic music at the Université de Montréal, studying its secrets with Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont while also studying piano and composition with Serge Garant. She began creating electroacoustic music, but also music for multimedia projects and, surprisingly, children music, each aspect of her career permeating the others. In 1994 the prestigious record label empreintes DIGITALes released her first CD of electroacoustic music, Amore. The reception was mixed, her style of cinema for the ear relying strongly on synthesized music and sound collage. She participated to the 1999 and 2000 editions of the Futura Festival in Crest (France) and the 2001 Bourges Festival.

Dans cette série “compact-compact”, on trouve aussi Amore de Roxanne Turcotte: de l’électro branché avec une tendance musique de danse, un univers proche du clip rempli d’anecdotes et d’images du quotidien amoureux. Claire-voie de Wende Bartley: la voix est au centre du travail, qu’elle soit en direct, dans une pièce mixte, ou enregistree. Manipulée, transformée, elle touche souvent à une dimension quasi-sacrée. Alchimie de Mario Rodrigue: cinq pièces d’une même facture.

Inscrit dans un recueil de six CD de musique électroacoustique canadienne, ce disque de 35 minutes se divise en cinq tableaux dépeignant des thèmes sur l’amour. Récipiendaire de deux prix de composition de la CAPAC dans les années 80, la compositrice montréalaise Roxanne Turcotte réalise un écran imaginaire à l’aide de matériaux sonores tels la sonnerie d’un téléphone, les sons de synthèse et la voix humaine pour représenter «la séduction, la passion et.. un souffle de vie.»

The second disc, Turcotte’s Amore, contains the six parts of a single piece (with the same title as that of the CD) that necessitated four years of work (1988-92) in various studios. Featuring the spoken and sung voices of Judith Bergeron, Daniel Leduc and the composer herself, Amore is an electroacoustic tale, ‘seasoned with passion, humor and… love’ (CD booklet notes). Though Turcotte’s approach to storytelling brings to mind the work of other francophone composers, like France’s Pierre Henry and Michel Chion, she does not shy away from pop-influenced composition and timbres. While some of her instrumental writing suffers from the limitations of her tools (RAM-limited samplers), the spoken texts are witty and focused on the main theme (love). Relating the telephone dialogues and subsequent preparation rituals of two would-be lovers planning a date at the movies, T’es le fun téléphone is unquestionably the strongest section of Amore.

Translated from French.