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