blog.Crónica

It’s only a few weeks ago that I reviewed ‘Courant.Air’ (see Vital Weekly 758) by Bernier, and while not bad, also perhaps not entirely satisfying either, and perhaps being made too quickly. Here on ‘Strings.Lines’ he moves away from the guitar, in favor of a new love (since 2007 actually) for tuning forks, of which he apparently has a large collection, which he plays in an improvised manner, then processed those recordings and in the next stage he adds the viola da gambe (played by Pierre-Yves Martel) and violin (by Chris Bartos) to that. Actually its hard to tell what these tuning forks do here, which part of the sound is the tuning forks because the two stringed instruments seem to be more present throughout these five pieces. The tuning forks present the ‘lines’ and the ‘strings’, well, that seems obviously. I must admit that ‘Strings.Lines’ did more than ‘Courant.Air’, even when it sits safely in the world of microsound: careful playing of instruments, but in a nice some what freely improvised manner, whereas below the decks obscured gliding tones take place and a more curious scratching the surface kind of rumbling. That all results in a fine album of what could be the cross road of electro-acoustic music, improvisation and modern classical. A strong new album. (FdW)

via Vital Weekly

A ne pas confondre avec le compositeur du XVIIIème du même nom. Ce musicien de musique électro acoustique québécois excèle dans les performances sonores, les installations et la vidéo. Collectionneur d’anciennes machines à écrire et de diapasons (dont certains atteignent les limites de l’oreille humaine), il a su créer son univers musical très personnel, utilisant des sonorités acoustique et électroniques générées par ces objets du passé et les technologies les plus récentes. Un matériel de création sonore représentatif des normes et des règles de nos musiques occidentales mais dont l’utilisation inventive et non conformiste donne, une fois encore, naissance à de très belles compositions intimistes et délicates. Nicolas Bernier est accompagné par Chris Bartos au violon et par pierre Yves Martel à la viole de gambe. Eric Serva