Various Artists

Électro Clips was conceived by Jean-François Denis and Claude Schryer for the arrival of the Montréal musiques actuelles/New Music America festival in November 1990. They commissioned twenty-five electroacoustic snapshots from composers in Québec, Canada, the United States and Mexico, each held to the three-minute length of a pop song and the logic of the video clip, so that every piece would work as a condensed summary of its author’s style. This 1996 disc reissues the project, first released in 1990 with photographs and texts on twenty-five loose sheets by the Québec City photographer Joanne Tremblay.

The approaches vary widely. John Oswald plays a bell the size of a pea across eight octaves, Craig Harris builds everything from recorded piano, and Bruno Degazio lets the logistic equation of fractal geometry decide notes and structure. Claude Schryer refuses processing and sets caged finches against trucks outside a Montréal fish store. Hildegard Westerkamp keeps her own breath audible throughout Breathing Room, and Robert Normandeau makes Bédé entirely from the voice of eleven-year-old Marie-Hélène Blain reading comic book onomatopoeias.

Francis Dhomont’s Qui est là?, commissioned by empreintes DIGITALes, compresses fragments of ten of his works from 1979 to 1989 into three minutes. Gilles Gobeil works with the improvising guitarist René Lussier in Associations libres. Javier Álvarez cuts up Dámaso Pérez Prado’s mambo Caballo Negro into a cubist collage in Mambo à la Braque, and Charles Amirkhanian uses gongs sampled at the home of Lou Harrison in Bajanoom. Also present are Yves Daoust, Stéphane Roy, Zack Settel, Roxanne Turcotte, Christian Calon, Laurie Radford, Amnon Wolman, Dan Lander and others.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9604, 1996.