Stéphane Roy

L’Inaudible collects five stereo acousmatic works that Stéphane Roy composed in his studio in Montréal between 2008 and 2019, his third album on empreintes DIGITALes after Kaleidos (1996) and Migrations (2003). The title comes from a line by Jean-François Lyotard, “The audible part of the work is musical only if it evokes the inaudible.” Roy never fixes form in advance: he works the material like a sculptor, through what he calls “transcendent listening”, until images emerge that sketch the piece. The album won the Prix Opus for album of the year in 2019-20.

Maelström (2014-16) is built on rough, sharp-edged motifs that gather into walls of sound at its beginning, middle and end, with a leitmotif that keeps being cut short. Train d’enfer (2010-11), at 21 minutes the longest piece, moves in three sections from obsessive semitones to a screaming machine of metal on metal. For Les aurores pourpres (2017-19) Roy returned to sound banks gathered during a year at Stanford University in the early 1990s, shaping old and new material with an infrared motion sensor that controls up to five synthesis parameters with one hand. Les territoires secrets, premiered in Cagliari in 2008 and revised in 2019, draws on travel writing, in particular Nicolas Bouvier’s L’usage du monde, and favours slow layered strata. Voies crépusculaires (2013-14) uses pulsed units as its axis and looks back to his early Crystal Music.

Born in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, in 1959, Roy holds a doctorate in electroacoustic composition and a PhD in musicology from the Université de Montréal. His book on the analysis of electroacoustic music (L’Harmattan, 2003) won the Prix Opus for book of the year.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 19162, 2019.