Yves Daoust

Bruits gathers four works by Yves Daoust from 1981 to 2001, opened by the half-hour cycle that gives the disc its title. It began as a commission from the Sonic Arts Network for a musical postcard of a place dear to the composer. Working from sounds recorded mostly in the streets and lanes of Montréal in the summer of 1997, Daoust ended up somewhere else: the material was exploded and deformed until it matched his memory of the city, where noise dominates.

Children's Corner (1997) moves through daytime worlds of markets, street festivals and public gardens in a haze of “sonic smog”, crossed by children, swallows and the beeping of reversing trucks. Nuit (1998), made at the IMEB in Bourges, flattens the same material into a long adagio, the day's noise lingering as tinnitus in the mind of a sleeper. Fête (2001) is an allegro barbaro of parades, fiddlers, bagpipes, fanfares, Dixieland and rock bands.

Impromptu 2 (1995) draws all its material from Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu op. 66 and is played by Jacques Drouin on piano and Lorraine Vaillancourt on keyboard. La gamme was born in 1981 at the Charybde studio in Bourges, where scales drifting in from a nearby music school became a frenetic dance of oscillators; the 2000 version reworks colours and mix. Ouverture (1989), commissioned by the GMEB for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, follows Québec history from 1760 to the referendums, with recorded voices for Lord Durham and other figures.

Born in Longueuil, Québec, in 1946, Daoust studied in Montréal and with Gilbert Amy in Paris, trained at the GMEB from 1973 to 1975 and worked as a sound designer at the National Film Board of Canada before teaching electroacoustic composition at the Québec conservatories.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0156, 2001.