Why Empreintes Digitales sometimes releases CDs and sometimes DVDs I am not sure of. The DVDs are not related to films, but contain 24-bit audio (as opposed to 16-bit on a normal CD) and surround versions. Maybe there are no surround sound versions available of the works they put on CD?

Here are two DVDs releases, and Nicolas Bernier seems a bit of an odd ball in the more academic serious world of Empreintes Digitales. His background is more in the microsound, ambient, glitch music and has had releases on Cronica, Ahornfelder, Leerraum and Home Normal. He uses the sounds of typewriters, field recordings, tuning forks, old machines and sometimes even real instruments. Yet on Travaux mécaniques his music sounds remarkable alike his peers on this label, save perhaps for the opening Antithèse électronique, which is an odd one minute laptop punk song. In the four other pieces sounds stumble about, with incidents happening all over the place. Writing Machine is an ode to William S Burroughs, cutting up a spoken word performance, along with the heavily processed sounds thereof and the sounds of a typewriter. Quite vibrant music, swiftly moving about with a great sense of drama. Not fully absorbed by the world of serious academic electronic music, this is quite an enjoyable work by someone who hasn’t fully understood — quite rightly as it turns out — the exact rules of composing, but follows his own path and makes his own great music.

Adrian Moore has a more serious background, with various studies and degrees in the UK and France and is a teacher. He operates more within the strict rules of composing this kind of acousmatic music, and even crosses the line towards classical music with his Fields of Darkness and Light for violin and electronics. […] In the other pieces he may use instruments too, but they are less recognizable (such as in 3Pieces [with] piano, horn and violin). Sounds tumble about, with glissandi working on and off and the whole thing has quite learned character. […]

Adrian Moore is director of the University of Sheffield Sound Studios (USSS). His own research delves into the acousmatic tradition in electroacoustic music, the performance of electroacoustic music, signal processing, and human-computer interaction in music. The pieces collected here show the amount of mastery of sound processing and some of the prepared ideas for live interactions.

Especially the first piece, Sustain made a certain impression. It was composed after he discovered the wide spectrum of variety pitch shifting transformation could produce. It is his most physical piece too and shows his mastery control of sound engineering. We hear compressed notes with aggressive activity, percussive, burbling, slightly echoing in space, expressed with very detailed sound and controlled restrictions and fast abrupt changes.

All other pieces play with sounds too but not as physical, natural and transformative as the first piece. All other pieces show change, but also the process of filtering, exceeding tempos etcetera and seem to occur more randomly with its variations over time. Three pieces are meant for reuse and show recorded changes of piano / horn / violin into different shapes of sound caused by changed speeds and other controls and filters. Pieces like this can be interactions of live recording with computer-processed playing in the same way real-time computer interaction is done, although Adrian Moore’s order of recording is different. Other pieces show the deformations coming back to the original sounds and then back to the returning studio world of sounds area.

The Atrium is a fantastic venue for certain kinds of music and electroacoustic performance definitely gains something extra special from the sheer vastness of its acoustic. Surprisingly, this entailed little or no loss of clarity or precision in the diffusion of the sounds.

Tuesday night’s performance for University Music in association with Sound was more than just a concert however. It was the occasion of a launch of a new CD of music by Pete Stollery and a surround sound DVD-Audio by Adrian Moore. These two releases are published by the Montréal-based label empreintes DIGITALes.

Electroacoustic music is a relatively new artistic endeavour and in listening to the works of new composers in the genre I am constantly amazed by the sheer variety of technical, musical, artistic and imaginative approaches to the genre. In certain respects the three pieces we heard by Adrian Moore and the two pieces by Pete Stollery approach the medium from radically different directions.

Adrian Moore’s compositions started with piano, violin or horns as sources and then moulded and transformed them into a whole mind-expanding new world of sound. His three pieces taken together were on a symphonic scale and the sounds of piano, violin and horns blossomed into a magnificent musical sound garden. Above all, his pieces were richly musical in their inspiration.

Pete Stollery two pieces come at the enterprise from a quite different direction. In his first piece Still Voices especially, he is acting partly as a preserver and curator of sounds in North East Scotland particularly those that are about to disappear because for instance their source is to be destroyed. In his second piece, scènes, rendez-vous which has become a kind of classic of its type, his sources are recorded direct from points in the streets of Paris along which the cinéaste Claude Lelouch drove his sports car during the making of his film short C’était un rendez-vous (definitely worth a look on YouTube if you have not seen it).

Thus if Adrian Moore takes a musical source and expands it out into a world of sound, Stollery starts with sounds throughout the world and moulds them into music. In both his pieces there are moments of recorded sound which are specific to a certain place or event but his work is not merely a series of these at random, the artistry comes first from the way in which these are arranged in order and then when these basic sound sequences are magically transmuted into musical creations that live in the realm of pure imagination.

I particularly love the sequence where the sounds of a French ambulance siren becomes like a huge organ cord or traffic passing over a grille on the road becomes almost like pizzicato strings.

I have heard scènes, rendez-vous in several venues, the Mitchell Hall, the Belmont Cinema, the Left Bank in Tarland and now in the Atrium. It has always been subtly different. This is partly because of the radically different venues, but also because Pete diffuses the sounds differently each time which gives electroacoustic performance the same immediacy and individuality as any live performance.