Roxanne Turcotte

Réverbères collects five works that Roxanne Turcotte realized between 2014 and 2021 at Studio Séducson, her studio in Montréal, all conceived for multichannel fixed medium. The title plays on the French word for a reflecting street lamp, a light bounced off surfaces like sound in a room, and the album frames its pieces as immersive tales of the Anthropocene: masks, pandemic silence, the strained bond between nature and humanity.

The longest work, Les oiseaux de Nias, was written for the Satosphère of the Société des arts technologiques in Montréal, a dome with 31 channels and 157 loudspeakers, and premiered there in 2019. It starts from a television report on songbirds captured on the Indonesian island of Nias for singing contests. Five soloists, Michel Dubeau, Julien Grégoire, Claire Marchand, Sonia Paço-Rocchia and Guy Pelletier, play bird calls, shakuhachi, sulings, piccolo, bassoon and didgeridoo against the Chœur d’oiseaux de Nias, 25 performers on game calls, plus fluorescent birdhouses with mini-loudspeakers and modified whistle-straws built by the composer. The studio recording dates from October 2020.

Masques et dichotomies filters a voice through imaginary face masks of varying fabric, with coughs, sneezes, a cicada saved from a cat and waves as structure. Au rythme des lucioles grew from an evening walk among fireflies in 2017. Le bruit des soupirs reworks segments made for a greeting-card sound installation, with Creole voices recorded in the Seychelles, and Tango déconstruit, built from an FM synthesizer piece of 1985 for mime artist Claude St-Denis, is a short tribute to Beatriz Ferreyra.

Born in Montréal in 1960, Turcotte studied piano at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and earned 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, the Luigi Russolo competition and the SOCAN Foundation’s Hugh Le Caine Award.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 21173, 2021.