BASCAILLE - Quelque Chose
Tour de Bras CD TDB90041
Antoine Létourneau-Berger, Olivier Noël et Tom Jacques : percussions et conception des instruments (instrument design)
Recorded in May 2019 at la salle Bouchard-Morisset du Conservatoire de musique de Rimouski, Bas-Saint-Laurent, Québec, Canada
I cannot say whether it was intended or not, but this collection of percussion pieces ‘reads’ much more like a report on various, technical, sound explorations than it sounds like music per se. There’s nothing wrong with that. I would describe them as aural artworks which have been developed to harvest unfamiliar sounds ‘from the effects of the amalgamations of a variety of physical forces on objects.’
Bascaille have collaborated with local crafts workers to gain stimulus from older percussion devices in order to develop new dissimilarities from them. This was in part reliant on a wish to move away from the Western tuning system and the means of its delivery. Part of that ambition was to effect control of the whole sound package in order to allow a musician to choose how to realise the character of the work and how it might be staged.
To this end a Bascaille concert is arranged such that each player is surrounded by a multiplicity of musical instruments and other sound devices, amplified in different ways. Their playing may include improvisation, micro intervals, noise, polyrhythms and scored music.
The manufactured sound devices may include fabrication from materials and objects such as bells flutes, grains, metal plates, motors, music boxes, nylon, plastic, rods, rubs, sandpaper, scrapers, skins, sticks, strings and wooden blocks.
The whole is an utterly inventive and fascinating collection of aural-art pieces which is inviting us to its forum.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Tour de Bras CD TDB90041
Antoine Létourneau-Berger, Olivier Noël et Tom Jacques : percussions et conception des instruments (instrument design)
Recorded in May 2019 at la salle Bouchard-Morisset du Conservatoire de musique de Rimouski, Bas-Saint-Laurent, Québec, Canada
I cannot say whether it was intended or not, but this collection of percussion pieces ‘reads’ much more like a report on various, technical, sound explorations than it sounds like music per se. There’s nothing wrong with that. I would describe them as aural artworks which have been developed to harvest unfamiliar sounds ‘from the effects of the amalgamations of a variety of physical forces on objects.’
Bascaille have collaborated with local crafts workers to gain stimulus from older percussion devices in order to develop new dissimilarities from them. This was in part reliant on a wish to move away from the Western tuning system and the means of its delivery. Part of that ambition was to effect control of the whole sound package in order to allow a musician to choose how to realise the character of the work and how it might be staged.
To this end a Bascaille concert is arranged such that each player is surrounded by a multiplicity of musical instruments and other sound devices, amplified in different ways. Their playing may include improvisation, micro intervals, noise, polyrhythms and scored music.
The manufactured sound devices may include fabrication from materials and objects such as bells flutes, grains, metal plates, motors, music boxes, nylon, plastic, rods, rubs, sandpaper, scrapers, skins, sticks, strings and wooden blocks.
The whole is an utterly inventive and fascinating collection of aural-art pieces which is inviting us to its forum.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
