Electronic / Electroacoustic

A relentless explorer, composer, performer and theorist, David Dunn (b 1953) uses electro-acoustic resources, voice, non-human living systems, as well as traditional instruments. A creator of text-sound compositions, environmental installations, works for radio and video, he has also written and published extensively. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world.  Growing up in San Diego in the sixties and seventies, he encountered people lik…

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.

Daniel Scheidt's software compositions of 1986 to 1990, in which an interactive computer system listens and responds to improvising soloists: percussionist Trevor Tureski, clarinettists Claude Schryer and Lori Freedman, soprano Catherine Lewis and trombonist George E Lewis.

Daniel Leduc's electroacoustic music drama on Wilhelm Müller's 24 Winterreise poems, spoken by actor Erwin Potitt and closed by a Cocteau-inspired coda, framed by three shorter works from 1994 to 1997.

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.

'Musica Mundana': Mixed, fusion and root music, work on 'harmonisation' of various music and vocals. A genuine alchemy! 'L'Estran': What a beautiful metaphor is this piece of coastline. It conveys an impression of in-between, uncertainty, contraries. After studying music in the French National Music School, a decisive encounter with Ivo Malec, Guy Reibel, Jacques Lejeune and Jean Schwarz at the GRM will introduce him to electroacoustic music which he will afterwards focus on. He has composed aro…

A single 23-minute acousmatic work by Christian Calon, made at the GRM in 1992-93 and revised in 1994 entirely from electric guitar sounds transformed in a spiral of metamorphoses; second prize at Bourges in 1994 and two distinctions at Prix Ars Electronica.

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.

Carlos Roque Alsina is an Argentinean-born composer who tends to mix acoustic and taped sounds together in a manner that evokes natural sounds to some degree, something of a more programmatically inclined Iannis Xenakis. The title piece combines piano and percussion with taped sounds that often possess an organ-like quality. While the acoustic instruments dance around each other in intricate patterns, the tape heaves and respires ominously, depicting the sort of backcountry that's unsettling in …

Three GRM commissions by the Lyon composer and ornithologist Bernard Fort, from 1992 to 2002: a meditation on time and loss, a sunrise on a lake in the Danube Delta full of herons and geese, and a long walk on crunching mountain snow.

Three works from 1986 to 1994 in which Annette Vande Gorne sets texts by the Belgian poet Werner Lambersy, from Noces noires, read in a near whisper by the poet himself, to Le ginkgo, commissioned by L’Année nouvelle. Reissue. CD-R.

Annette Vande Gorne's five-part acousmatic cycle from 1983 to 1991, one piece for each of the Taoist elements, moving from the raw water recordings of Eau to Terre, an 8-channel GRM commission dedicated to François Bayle. CD-R.

Four fixed-medium works by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay from 2014 to 2020, conceived as poems rather than chapters: a 28-channel ode to post-industrial northern England, a cycle on defining words, an attempt at mindfulness and a saturated Newsfeed.

Nine acousmatic works by the Belgian composer and cinema foley artist Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans from 1991 to 2021, all made at Métamorphoses d’Orphée, including a trilogy held up as a mirror to the pandemic and homages to Francis Ponge and Francis Dhomont.

A four-part acousmatic cycle by Louis Dufort on the forest, drawn from many treks in the Canadian Rockies and Québec’s boreal forest, developed from 2016 and finalised in 2020-21, moving from a pastoral opening to an abstract ode to nature.

Five works Robert Normandeau composed between 2013 and 2021 for a dome of loudspeakers, heard here as stereo “postcards”: a bandoneon-only Melancholia, a commission for the Montréal metro's 50th anniversary with the OSM's new octobass, and material from Jorane's stage project.

Five multichannel works by Roxanne Turcotte from 2014 to 2021, centred on Les oiseaux de Nias, a half-hour piece for five wind soloists, a choir of 25 bird calls and fixed medium about songbird trafficking in Indonesia.

Four works by Denis Smalley from 1981 to 2011, three six-channel pieces heard in stereo Ambisonic versions by Jonty Harrison and the Bourges prizewinner Vortex, from Danish church bells at dusk to the winds of Golden Bay in New Zealand.