Fractures doesn’t consist of conventional music… unless, of course, you’re in that poetic/stoned frame of mind in which rustling trees and murmuring highways constitute a symphony. But then, this is precisely what you’re expecting if you’re at all familiar with empreintes DIGITALes.

Fractures’ sixteen tracks of low-level ambient noise — most of it recorded in public places throughout Canada and Europe — form a cohesive and often lovely aural palette. The opening selection, Angle mort, sets out to explore the struggle of an injured patient amid the inhumanity of a hospital room. A trio of tracks titled Trois miniatures en suite experiment with the parameters of the electroacoustic sound, while setting the stage for a twelve-track epic collectively known as Parcelles. Bouchard explains these final selections as illustrating: “the sound environment of a particular time, the chaos of the world, the rural calm, the urban swarms, the energy of the living” and finally, “fragments of moments.” It’s a vivid, fascinating explanation, and like the rest of the liner notes, it lends meaning to the album’s audio/recording experiments.Fractures offers moments of brilliance, which will undoubtedly help to flesh out the electroacoustic artform, much of it is too abstract to be of lasting interest.-->