Roxanne Turcotte

Fenêtres Intérieures gathers eight works that Roxanne Turcotte realized between 2009 and 2014 at her Studio Séducson in Montréal. She describes them as sonic essays on the passing of time seen from the inside: windows that open on past lives, on the inner parts of a piano, on birds and wind in the sails, and on the social, political and environmental worries of the present. Four pieces are for fixed medium alone, four add a live performer.

De la fenêtre, a 16-channel work commissioned by the writer Étienne Lalonde, integrates an excerpt of his Les yeux crevés du soleil read by Céline Bonnier and Pierre Lebeau. Bestiaire is a set of ten intertwined environmental divertimentos built from many field recording sessions, real and imaginary animals among them a parrot conversing in Spanish at exactly 880 Hz; it won third prize at the Prix collégien de musique contemporaine 2009-10. In Alibi des voltigeurs, also on a Lalonde text, the narrator Laur Fugère is caught by a looper that stacks her phrases into a nursery rhyme.

OVI (Objet volant identifié) starts from an eolian harp of recycled materials built with François Doyon, who plays modified electric guitar here with Francis Brunet-Turcotte, and ends on the whistling of boat mast shrouds. Zone d’exclusion, with shakuhachi player Michel Rakumon Dubeau, was made in 2013 for a project about Fukushima. Tout en rouge uses recordings from the 2012 student demonstrations, Petit ange sets five melodicas in memory of a child, and Le piano d’Horowitz began with a portable recorder on Horowitz’s piano in a Montréal store.

Born in Montréal in 1960, Roxanne Turcotte studied piano at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and took a master’s degree in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal in 1988 under Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont. Her music has won prizes at Bourges and at the Luigi Russolo competition. The album was a finalist for the Prix Opus 2014-15 disc of the year.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 14126, 2014.