Electronic / Acousmatic Music

Five 16-channel works by Robert Normandeau from 2001 to 2003, concert pieces reworked from his theatre music for Brigitte Haentjens, including StrinGDberg for hurdy-gurdy and cello and the Fribourg prizewinner Chorus. 2017 reissue of the 2005 album.

Three acousmatic works by Robert Normandeau from 1999 to 2001: Malina, made only from Claire Marchand’s shakuhachi, Erinyes, frozen onomatopoeias of actors from a staging of Electra, and the 36-minute Clair de terre, which translates the grammar of cinema into sound.

Six works by the Toronto composer Randall Smith from 1995 to 1999, three for tape alone and three mixed pieces for cello, accordion, double bass and alto flute, remastered by Ernest Cholakis.

The first album by the Toronto composer Randall Smith: five tape works from 1988 to 1994, from water music made without any water to The Black Museum, his tribute to the GRM, first prize at the Luigi Russolo competition in 1993.

Debut album of Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, five acousmatic works from 1997 to 2004 made between Montréal, Birmingham and Huddersfield, from a remix built around rapper Dice B to a Baudelaire piece on three Montréal church bells. DVD-Audio.

Philippe Mion’s acousmatic opera Léone (1993), on a libretto by Philippe Minyana drawn from a true news story: six singers conducted by Laurent Cuniot, with the whole orchestra replaced by tape composed at the Ina-GRM and Grame.

Four acousmatic studies by Philippe Le Goff from 1991 to 1995, built on recordings he made between 1988 and 1993 among the Inuit of Nunavik and Baffin Island: conversations, laughter, chants, wind and the shamanic drum.

Comes with with 8-page foldout booklet. Originally conceived for eight-channel surround sound playback, Soft and Loud is comprised of field recordings made in Japan between 1999 and 2001.

Seven acousmatic works by Pete Stollery from 1993 to 2003, playing on the ambiguity between recognisable sounds and pure sound: a key in a lock, a roulette wheel, bicycle spokes, Aberdeen streets, old industrial machines. Each piece introduced by a fellow composer. DVD-Audio.

Paul Dolden's 49-minute Entropic Twilights, layered from hundreds of separately recorded parts for voices, brass, gamelan, drum kits and saucepans, with two Resonance pieces for flute and for ten string parts and tape, made between 1994 and 2004.

Patrick Ascione's acousmatic triptych of 1984 to 1989, commissioned by the Ina-GRM: three long multi-part pieces built on his idea of tape as a canvas for sound, with a preface by Michel Chion.

Five acousmatic works by Ned Bouhalassa from 1990 to 1998 tracing his move from cinema for the ear towards techno, from Jets, written for San Francisco’s Sound Traffic Control, to the self-portrait Constamment and the Russolo prizewinner Attraction.

Natasha Barrett’s first years in Norway, 1998 to 2001: Arctic weather, red snow, a 24-hour rain forest recording and a valley of machines, with three extracts from Displaced:Replaced, an installation driven by live meteorological sensors.

Four works by Monique Jean from 1997 to 2001 on destruction, memory and the real, with texts by Hélène Cixous, Alejo Carpentier and Denise Desautels, contrabass improvisations by Joëlle Léandre and, in low memory #2, flutist Claire Marchand.

The tape works of Québec composer Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, made between 1970 and 1981 at the GRM in Paris, in Bourges and at Simon Fraser University, from the vocal vertigo of Arksalalartôq to the eighteen-minute Constellation I.

Five short electroacoustic works by Mario Rodrigue from 1985 to 1993, three of them made with analog tape techniques at the Université de Montréal and reworked for this disc, including the CBC Grand Prize winner Tilt.

A 1976-2002 retrospective of Marcelle Deschênes: music for Georges Dyens' holographic installations, the multimedia show Lux, two pieces from the unfinished cycle Griffes and the Bourges-winning Moll for winds, percussion and toys. DVD-Audio.

Six tape works by Marc Tremblay from 1989 to 1998 that find music in everyday noise: cars, telephones, washrooms, the Montréal Stock Exchange and the soundtracks of El Dorado and The Searchers, remixed in Bourges for Cowboy Fiction.

Four acousmatic works by Louis Dufort from 1996 to 2000, from night recordings on Mont-Royal and the refineries of east-end Montréal to Décap, partly drawn from his music for Compagnie Marie Chouinard and mentioned at Ars Electronica 2001.

The French duo Kristoff K.Roll’s 78-minute musical diary of a trip through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, composed from 1990 to 1993 in Paris from sounds gathered on the road: marimba players in Mérida, Belizean rappers, taco sellers on buses.

Five stereo acousmatic works by Jonty Harrison from 1978 to 1995, from the analogue Pair / Impair to the GRM commission Hot Air built on party balloons, with the eleven-movement French suite … et ainsi de suite… made from wine glasses.

Five acousmatic works by Jonty Harrison from 1982 to 1999, built from casserole dishes, packing materials, splintering wood and water, including the Euphonie d’or winner Klang and his first multichannel tape piece, Streams.

Five acousmatic works by John Young from 1995 to 2001, each grown from one intimate or environmental sound: hands, a single breath, wind across two microphones, a childhood swing and rain falling on leaves, windows and puddles.

Two versions of John Oswald's one-note composition from 2000-03, built entirely on the pitch A in its ten audible octaves, with a tuned prairie thunderstorm, tuned birds, a Disklavier piano and the cello of Joan Jeanrenaud. CD-R.

Six fixed-medium works by Jacques Tremblay from 1990 to 1995, built from concrete sounds and quotations: Gregorian chant turning to distortion, a night of love in six movements, a jazz tribute and a sound reading of Proust’s Combray.

Iannis Xenakis's La légende d'Eer (1977-78) for 7-channel tape, written for the Diatope at the Centre Pompidou, in a new stereo mix by Gerard Pape from the analogue master tape. The DVD adds surround sound, a film and an interview.

Five soundscape compositions by Hildegard Westerkamp from 1979 to 1992, among them Kits Beach Soundwalk and Beneath the Forest Floor, recorded on Vancouver streets, a Mexican desert and old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, with hornist Brian G’froerer.

Hans Tutschku’s first empreintes DIGITALes portrait: five works from 1991 to 1998 built on voice and speech, from poems by Georg Trakl, Karl Lubomirski and Antonio Bueno Tubía to recordings from a 1997 Asian tour in extrémités lointaines.

A 66-minute electroacoustic work after Goethe's Faust, composed over seven years (1996-2003) by old friends Gilles Gobeil and René Lussier, with Lussier's guitars and daxophone set into Gobeil's studio transformations across 17 scenes.

Eight works by Gilles Gobeil from 1985 to 1994, among them Le vertige inconnu made at the GMEB in Bourges and two pieces for ondist Suzanne Binet-Audet, plus Associations libres with guitarist René Lussier.

Gilles Gobeil’s three works for ondes Martenot and fixed medium, written between 1988 and 2002 and recorded in 2004-05 with Suzanne Binet-Audet, who commissioned the first; winner of the Prix Opus disc of the year 2004-05. DVD-Audio.

Four acousmatic works by Gilles Gobeil from 1995 to 2001, cinema for the ear drawn from literature and travel: Proust’s Swann’s Way read by Marc Béland, H.G. Wells’s time machine, Jules Verne’s underworld and sounds from a trip to Italy.

Francis Dhomont’s 51-minute acousmatic descent into schizophrenia, built on the writings of RD Laing and on the single note B natural, winner at Bourges in 1981 and first issued by the Ina-GRM in 1982.

Four acousmatic works by Francis Dhomont from 1986 to 1991, the second part of his Mouvances~Métaphores cycle, including the Bourges Magisterium winner Chiaroscuro and Signé Dionysos, a lakeshore opera in which every role is sung by frogs.

Francis Dhomont's acousmatic triptych on wandering, composed in Montréal and Marseille between 1981 and 1989: Points de fuite, the nine-movement … mourir un peu, which quotes Schaeffer and Henry, and the spatial Espace / Escape.

Eight acousmatic works by Francis Dhomont spanning fifteen years, from his only purely electronic piece of 1985-86 to Lettre de Sarajevo and the swallows of Vol d’Arondes, several of them prizewinners. Disque de l’année at the Prix Opus 2002-03.

Francis Dhomont's four-part homage to Pierre Schaeffer and fifty years of musique concrète (1989-98), built from the first movement of the Étude aux objets, with Machaut, Pierre Henry's door and a list of “inventors of the treasure” along the way.

Five works by Denis Smalley from 1976 to 1992, including Wind Chimes, Valley Flow and the Golden Nica-winning Clarinet Threads with Roger Heaton, plus Piano Nets with Philip Mead, all remastered by the composer for this 2004 edition.

Four acousmatic works by Denis Smalley from 1974 to 2000, each grown from one sound source: Derek Shiel's metal sculptures, air in Cretan garden pots, two water recordings, and the drone of Northumbrian pipes in the early GRM piece Pentes.

Three works by Darren Copeland from 1993 to 1996 built on real-world sound, including Night Camera, whose three scenes unfold inside recordings from the World Soundscape Collection at Simon Fraser University.