Christian Bouchard

IV is the fourth album by Christian Bouchard on empreintes DIGITALes, five works composed between 2013 and 2022 in his Montréal studio. Three abstract pieces alternate with two drawn from soundscapes, the two sides he says have run through his work from the beginning: the recorded environment as material to be sculpted, and abstraction that creates sound worlds without references.

Portrait Montréal, dedicated to his teacher Yves Daoust, comes from more than six hours of eight-track recordings made from his car in 2013 and 2014: microphones on the roof and inside the car, firemen’s and police radio streamed from the Internet, a weather station and three FM stations, on a drive from the Old Port to the Mont-Royal belvedere. The incidents on the police radio became the core of the piece. For Montréal-mafia he asked fellow location sound recordists to record 15 minutes starting at 9 pm on September 26, 2013. Only three answered, so the piece is a quartet: the port, a dinner conversation about a collusion scandal and the mafia, a restaurant kitchen whose chef throws the microphones out, and the city seen from the mountain.

Birdscape, for four channels, uses only the songs of Canadian birds, spatialized after imagined flight paths, from the figure eights of swallows to the hovering of hummingbirds. UHF-Complex breathes movement into a folder of oscillator files, and Nombres et silences uses the Fibonacci series for rhythms and silences, presented as a file recovered from a hard drive in 2113.

Born in Quebec City in 1968, Bouchard studied with Daoust at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, winning a first prize in electroacoustic composition in 2000. He co-founded the live quartet Theresa Transistor, received the Joseph S Stauffer Prize in 2017 and works as a location sound recordist for cinema.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 23185, 2023.