Monique Jean

L’Adieu au S.O.S. collects four works that Monique Jean composed between 1997 and 2001, three for fixed medium and one for bass flute and electroacoustic sounds. She writes that they were made “with eyes wide open”, from the conviction that music expresses a sensibility anchored in the reality around us. Stick and electric bass sounds by Marie Trudeau recur across the whole disc.

13'13 pour voix défigurées, first presented in 1997 with three-screen video, is about helplessness in the face of destruction. Processed voices cross different times and intrude more and more until they are everywhere, carrying texts by Hélène Cixous, from Beethoven à jamais, and Alejo Carpentier, from Varèse vivant. Danse de l’enfant esseulée, dedicated to Monique Bertrand, is built on suspended time, both the fall of losing one’s footing and the tense pause on a single sound; it was a finalist at Musica Nova 2001 and Ciber@RT 1999.

Figures du temps is a three-part suite on the collision of private and public events, taking its cue from Tadeusz Kantor’s words on the small, defenceless but magnificent human life, and from the disappearance of Morse code in February 1999. Its middle movement uses texts by Denise Desautels and contrabass improvisations by Joëlle Léandre. low memory #2, commissioned and premiered by the flutist Claire Marchand in 2001, sets restrained bass flute and piccolo against dense electronic sound; it was a finalist at Bourges and received a special mention at Métamorphoses 2002.

Born in Caraquet, New Brunswick, in 1960, Monique Jean works across electroacoustic and mixed music, installations and improvisation, focusing on the tensions and fractures of sound materials. Her later album Greffes won a Prix Opus in 2012-13; this disc was a Prix Opus finalist for 2002-03.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0366, 2003.