Various Artists

Trans_canada documents a festival held at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe in February 2005. Curators Ludger Brümmer and Sabine Breitsameter invited eight Canadian composers to create new works in the ZKM studios, looking at two currents of Canadian electroacoustic music, acousmatics and soundscape composition. The DVD-Audio holds 156 minutes of music, with pieces conceived for stereo, 5.1, 8 and 16 channels.

The pieces start from very different places. Nicolas Bernier applies William S Burroughs’ cut-up technique to Burroughs’ own words and to the sounds of typewriters in Writing Machine. Francis Dhomont’s Brief an den Vater sets a few sentences of Franz Kafka’s unsent letter to his father, read by Martin Engler, against vocal material from Hans Tutschku, a first study for his long Kafka project Le cri du Choucas. Gilles Gobeil’s Ombres, espaces, silences… evokes the Desert Fathers through fragments of Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova polyphony and won an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2005. Louis Dufort builds Hi_Res on a MIDI controller manual read by Darren Copeland, whose own Let Me Out, a 35-minute piece commissioned by the ORF, draws on empty corridors and on writing about autism by Birger Sellin.

Robert Normandeau’s Palimpseste, made only from onomatopoeias, closes his Onomatopoeias cycle with a homage to old age. Barry Truax derives all of The Shaman Ascending from the voice of bass singer Derrick Christian, inspired by Inuit sculptures by John Terriak and by throat singing. Hildegard Westerkamp’s Für Dich, For You sets Rainer Maria Rilke’s Liebes-Lied in German and in Norbert Ruebsaat’s English translation, with sounds from North Germany, where she grew up, and the west coast of Canada.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 09100, 2009.