Daniel Leduc

Le Voyage d'Hiver presents four works by Daniel Leduc from 1994 to 1997, a period he describes as his transition from analog to digital tools and the settling of his style. All are miniatures or suites of miniatures for stereo, drawing on acousmatics, radio techniques and the sound environment, with a leaning towards the minimalist and the impressionistic.

At the centre is Die Winterreise (1995-97), his most ambitious piece to date: an electroacoustic music drama on the 24 poems of Wilhelm Müller, spoken by the Montréal actor of German origin Erwin Potitt. Each poem is its own short track, from Gute Nacht to Der Leiermann, with the soundscape used as metaphor for the wanderer's winter. Leduc adds a 25th miniature, Coda, in which the poet passes through a mirror into the world of the dead as in a film by Jean Cocteau, followed by the sound of a receding motorbike; the breaking mirror was recorded by Ned Bouhalassa.

The disc opens with a three-minute piece whose title alone tells a story of Josef K. and a French tourist outside a railway station; made with sounds from the GRM's SYTER system, it won the Public Radio Award at an ACREQ electro-clip competition in 1994. Traverser les grandes eaux takes its title from a recurring phrase of the I Ching and is the prelude to a project of 64 short pieces on its hexagrams. Troposphère (1997), an ACREQ commission, is a minimalist suite of four layered pieces named after cloud types, the last with the voice of Chantal Fournier.

Born in Montréal in 1965, Leduc is a journalist who began in community radio in 1984. He holds a doctorate in electroacoustic composition from the Université de Montréal and was president of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community from 1992 to 1994.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9945, 1999.