blog.Crónica

Nicolas Bernier’s passion for sound and for beautiful and intricate structures earned him a honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica two years ago for his debut album, Les Arbres. This record was in no way Bernier’s first foray onto the music scene, but until then, his work has mainly constituted of collaborative efforts and of installations. With three releases out in a matter of months, Bernier charts very different aspects of his electro-acoustic work.

Bernier uses a wide range of sonic sources in his work, which are often processed into fragile clusters and placed against acoustic instrumentation. In the series of recordings he has made with guitarist Simon Trottier, Bernier has absorbed elements of folk music and distorted them as to retain only the slightest traces of melody, and surrounded them with noise, interferences and field recordings. Courant.Air, published on Ahornfelder, sees the pair working together once again. Recorded over a two year period, and the result of two distinct commissioned work, this album is partly a tribute to the St. Lawrence River which has played such an important part in Canadian history and which has shaped both the landscapes it crosses and the people who depend on it. The extremely intricate and detailed soundscapes collected here occasionally contrast with Trottier’s gentle guitar work, his contribution at times left to flourish amidst stark and fragmented sound collages (Soubresauts, Petit Port Bien Abrité, Air.Chanson.Usure, Propulsion), at others processed and assimilated into Bernier’s epic creations. There is a constant shift here between dense electro-acoustic moments and more pastoral motifs, but the pair ultimately feed from one another, allowing the music to filter through Bernier’s abstract constructions just enough to ground it firmly.

Released a couple of months before Courant.Air, Strings.Lines, issued on Portuguese imprint Crónica, is a very different project. Recorded with Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba) and Chris Bartos (violin), the album is centered around Bernier’s fascination for tuning forks, which he avidly collects, and the variations in frequency they can reach. Having sourced the sounds emitted by his tuning forks, Bernier set out to process them into improvised sound formations. In a second instance, Martel and Bartos were asked to play close to a single pitch, and use the whole of their instruments, including bodies, bows and strings to build additional musical layers as a response to Bernier’s earlier work. While melodies are largely dropped in favour of the sonic aspect of the instruments, there is greater musicality to be found in the five pieces making this album, albeit in drone forms for the most part. Toward the end of Line (C) however, Bernier builds up a clearly defined rhythmic pattern, giving the piece a surprisingly conventional outline for a moment. Line (Horizon) which follows, resorts to the sombre sound forms created by the two string players, at a time combining the increasingly threatening hum of the strings and various textured field recordings into a particularly dense soundscape before leaving it to dissolve over the later part of the piece.

Bernier is sole on board for the LP-only Usure.Paysage, the most recent of the three albums, and, over the course of four tracks, two clocking at around ten to eleven minutes, the other two much shorter, he exposes the electro-acoustic nature of his work through a series of highly fragmented and contrasted sound collages, built from varied field recordings. This is in many ways the most disturbing and fascinating of the three records, its pieces building up into heavy abstract forms, cut short by far ranging noise conflagrations or infinitely small sonic particles. Each of the four pieces is made of juxtaposed sequences, with nothing to clearly link them together other than the simple fact that they exist in a pre-defined order. The impression though is that of a living scenery, subjected to random events, and reacting or adapting to them. Bernier expertly plays with the mind here, often tricking it into a false sense of safety and peace, only to drop a deep thunder or layer high pitched metal on metal friction or, it appears at one point, human screams.

Although released in quick successions, these three records stem from totally different ideas, the resulting pieces, while bearing some common elements, revealing Nicolas Bernier as a particularly inquisitive mind and creative sound artist.

Nicolas Bernier’s Strings.Lines uses tuning forks, violin and viola de gamba to produce music that effortlessly evokes early music and also the future. Bernier has these ancient instruments weave slow, graceful, often pained patterns akin to the trio sonatas of baroque composers, but pits these against extreme high and low sustained tones from the tuning forks that most closely recalls the sine waves of Ryoji Ikeda. Before reading the notes to the release that is exactly what I thought was happening, contemporary works for strings and digital electronics.

The glacial gloom conveyed from the strings is actually closer to work by backwards-looking contemporary composers like Arvo Part and Valentin Silvestrov, but like their music a timeless simplicity is present. The forks produce almost painful drones which the players try to match, happily sliding off course to create sorrowful improvisations around these fixed points. The forks also slip and slide, producing acoustic “glitches” comparable to the slips created by the performers. This is a marvellous recording of new music which engages with history in surprising and disorienting ways. Joshua Meggitt

via Cyclic Defrost

Cinque tracce in cui la viola da gamba di Pierre-Yves Martel e il violino di Chris Bartos accompagnano i detriti orchestrati da Nicolas Bernier. Un’intesa miracolosa che genera un lavoro spettacolare in cui le corde inciampano in melodie senza tempo prima di rantolare in vicoli senza luce. “Line (A)”, la seconda traccia in scaletta, è la porta d’accesso all’universo in bianco e nero di Bernier, un mondo in cui ogni particolare racchiude una storia. Senza souzione di continuità le tracce si susseguono in un racconto emozionante, che se da una parte potrebbe ricordare una colonna sonora di un cartone animato di Tim Burton, dall’altra mostra tutta la carica visionaria di un musicista come Nicolas Bernier. Meraviglioso. Roberto Mandolini

Dei diapason. Guide quasi morali. Le “linee” a cui fa riferimento il titolo del nuovo suggestivo lavoro di Nicolas Bernier sono “tuning fork”, strumenti di accordatura e curiosi spiriti di metallo che riproducono un “puro tono”, a cui anelare. Per un anno e mezzo (settembre 2008-febbraio 2010), Nicolas ha seguito la fascinazione di ciò che detta la regola: ha chiamato a sé due suonatori d’archi, Pierre-Yves Martel (violista) e Chris Bartos (violinista) e insieme hanno esplorato le risorse asintotiche del tuning attorno a una determinata frequenza. Bernier, compositore elettroacustico canadese (curiosamente omonimo di un compositore francese del Seicento), ha miscelato questi elementi riuscendo a creare una ricerca sui timbri di grande impatto, con un’insistenza e un’intensità che ricordano le notti di Giacinto Scelsi, più che le ricerche di Luciano Berio. Funziona particolarmente la dinamica e il sistema di relazioni che si creano tra layer ambiental-elettronici (sfrigolii so sticati n quasi al silenzio, a volte – line (c) – formicai percussivi) e le note acustiche (line (a)), prolungate no a essere un mantra dell’essenza. Ciò che sembra paradossale, ma solo in apparenza, è la possibilità di fare improvvisazione attorno al concept di String Lines. Non è per nulla inconcepibile maturare un approccio alla nota che per quanto si avvicini la rifugga, ne colga interstizi, vie d’uscita, mimetizzati nella ripetizione.

L’ascoltatore vive una piccola narrazione, dalla quale è costretto a rimanerne escluso. È imbavagliato, come in una camicia di forza, dall’ipnosi dei forks, e gode, impotente, della maestria altrui nel fare fuga e trovare escamotage per ravvivarne le potenzialità compositive. (7.2/10) Gaspare Caliri