Dominique Bassal

Poupées Mathématiques collects six works that Dominique Bassal realized in 7.1 channels between 2012 and 2014 in his Montréal studio, most of them premiered at the Électrochoc 3 concert at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal in December 2013. The disc is a music-only Blu-ray with 7.1, 5.1 and stereo mixes at 96 kHz / 24-bit in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio, a format Bassal chose after the playback problems of the DVD-A / DVD-V hybrid of his previous album Ubiquité (2009). In his note he presents the record as an attempt to find a way out of the “acousmatic cul-de-sac” and to reach listeners outside the small electroacoustic community.

Each piece is a fable with a political edge. In the title work, a few dozen pink spy dolls, designed to detect future deviants from the crib, learn the mystique of patrolling through a vocabulary of digits before sliding into depression and paranoia. Choraal: frontière Nord flies low over the German frontier of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century, past druid-led choirs and processions with brass horn calls. Babylone, les regrets sets the loss of a child by an enslaved couple under Nebuchadnezzar II beside the same drama in a bombed Baghdad. Conséquences des gaz à effet de serre, premiered in Strasbourg in 2012, imagines the catastrophe and its survivors, and Broto et sa z’complice follows two idiotic alien agents gathering insignificant bits of melody.

Born in Cairo in 1955, Bassal studied electroacoustic music, then spent years as an arranger, producer and studio manager in commercial music before returning to electroacoustics in 2001. He won Jeu de temps / Times Play in 2002, wrote The Practice of Mastering in Electroacoustics and has been mastering engineer for empreintes DIGITALes since 2004.

Blu-ray Audio (BD-R) in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 14130, 2014.