Electronic / Field Recordings

Yves Daoust's portrait of Montréal through its noise, the three-part Bruits (1997-2001), with Impromptu 2 on Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu, the 1981 analog-synthesis piece La gamme and Ouverture, a GMEB commission on Québec history.

Nine works by the Havana-born composer Sergio Barroso from 1982 to 1995, most for microtonal Yamaha FM synthesizers he plays himself, with oboe, violin, viola and bassoon soloists and echoes of charanga, flamenco and Cuban street music.

Five multitrack works by Robert Normandeau from 1990 to 1993, his “cinema for the ear” period, built from a child's voice, four teenagers, Mozart's chamber music and the elements, each recorded as a live diffusion over eight loudspeakers at The Banff Centre.

Robert Normandeau's early acousmatic works from 1984 to 1989, his “cinema for the ear”: the many meanings of the word jeu, a requiem made only of requiem fragments, and music first written for Georges Dyens' holosculptures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"South of a disused caravan site (elevation 225) and north of a sheep wash (elevation 238) is a point where electrified wires descend from a hilltop and meet. Mr Harrison has been recording at this focus in varying weather conditions over several years using piezo-transducers amd portable MD equipment. By this simple technique the entire hillside is turned into a microphone." Recorded 1997-1999 at Drone Hill.

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.

Eight fixed-medium works by Darren Copeland from 1991 to 2003, tied by the tension between losing and finding: a CNN eyewitness account of 9/11, the voices of Marconi and Eckersly, a 36-hour train route from London to Moscow. DVD-Audio.

Four radio works by Dan Lander from 1988 to 1992, three cut with a razor blade on 1/4" tape: a dismantling of radio conventions with Gregory Whitehead, a portrait of his back injury through friends' memories, and a Toronto zoo heard as machine.

Four soundscape compositions by Claude Schryer from 1995 to 1997, arranged as the four cardinal points of North America: Québec City, Mexico, Vancouver and a Montréal harbour symphony of boat horns, trains and bells joined by Jean Derome and Tom Walsh.

Four acousmatic works by Christian Bouchard from 1997 to 2003: crowds, parades and a friend caught in a blind spot in Angle mort, three soundscape miniatures, and the two Parcelles, sounds of the world recorded and asked to pose.

Pierre-Luc Lecours's Éclats (2014-20), four pieces each tied to a colour, where recordings of piano, cello, flute and percussion meet modular synthesis and noise, plus Impacts discrets, built partly from snow and ice on the roofs of Old Québec.

Eight acousmatic works by James Andean from 2010 to 2018, mostly made in Helsinki: sounds from Luc Ferrari's archives, Maria Callas as Medea, a refrigerator in a Greek monastery, the inside of a piano and a garbled recording of John Cage.

Two large multichannel works by Jonty Harrison from 2014 and 2015, built on 25 years of field recordings from train stations, glaciers, rainforests and markets, here in stereo Ambisonic UHJ encodings made by Joseph Anderson in Seattle.

Lepidoptera, a five-movement work for recorders and electronics by Monty Adkins and Terri Hron from 2014-15, named after families of butterflies, moths and dragonflies, with every electronic sound drawn from a Renaissance-style recorder consort played by Hron.

Six acousmatic works by Elizabeth Anderson from 1994 to 2014, mostly octophonic, from the voices of eighteen languages recorded for the Nazi fortress of Mimoyecques to sonified solar winds and a tesseract taken from A Wrinkle in Time.

Eight works by Roxanne Turcotte from 2009 to 2014, fixed media alone or with melodicas, narrator, guitars, shakuhachi and piano, from a bird and animal bestiary to field recordings of the 2012 Maple Spring protests in Montréal.

Five multichannel works by David Berezan from 2008 to 2011, each rooted in a place or a single sound: sea buoys, a Balinese thumb piano, the Alberta Badlands, the Galungan festival in Ubud and the nightingale floors of Nijō Castle.

Five acousmatic works by Martin Bédard from 2004 to 2012 rooted in places, from the cells of Québec City’s old jail and the city’s archaeological digs to trains, a night watchman’s rounds and the 1907 collapse of the Québec Bridge.

Six acousmatic works by Steven Naylor from 2000 to 2006 built around imagined places: Walkman recordings from Chiang Mai and urban Japan, mechanical toys, Kunekune pigs and a 27-minute radiophonic piece on homelessness in Halifax. DVD-Audio.

Alain Thibault's 1985-1990 music for soloists against computer-controlled tape, drawing on studio pop, rock and jazz: a MIDI piano concerto for Jacques Drouin, a piece for soprano Pauline Vaillancourt, excerpts from his video opera OUT and ELVIS for saxophone quartet.

Six acousmatic works from 2007 to 2011 by the English composer Manuella Blackburn, built from kitchen utensils, switches and an old TV, a cajón, electric guitar, Japanese instruments recorded in Tokyo and sounds from Denis Smalley’s Wind Chimes.