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Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux
Impulsion
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.date Nov-07-2004
.style Avantgarde
.label empreintes DIGITALes
.cat.no. IMED 0159
.source CDDA
.type Album
.quality VBRkbps 44.1hz Joint-Stereo
.size 82,4 MB
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This is a daring and important disc released by the empreintes DIGITALes
label in MontrΘal. It features the electroacoustic sound art of Coulombe
Saint-Marcoux, a genius conceptual artist who manipulated tape
recordings to achieve a brilliant sound as art aesthetic. Sadly, she
died at the tragically young age of 47. So it is of the utmost
importance that this revolutionary art be documented on a compilation as
critical as this. The work abounds with heavily treated sounds, voices
engaging in non-singing and bizarre atmospherics. The liner notes are
painstakingly done, and the digital forum serves Coulombe
Saint-MarcouxÆs work exquisitely. She once stated ôelectroacoustic music
is a continuous fusion of doing and hearing, a permanent equilibrium
between the composer's intention (what is in his head) and the result
(what is on the tape).ö This is a very important document of a true
artist.
Gary Flanagan
I sincerely appreciate when empreintes DIGITALes digs into the archives
and releases some historical material, which I think the content of this
CD must be considered. The composer Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux
passed into her Bardo and her next life in 1985, and most of the
material herein stems from the early 1970s, even though it may sound
more modern and current than that.
I suppose there must be a goldmine of archival tapes in the annals of
electroacoustics, and I urge any recording company with tapes on hand to
start releasing the material. Almost all historical or archival material
that I've heard ù including the pieces on this CD ù has been very
enjoyable and of the greatest interest.
Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux ù born in the Canadian region of Lac
Saint-Jean in 1938 ù moved to MontrΘal in 1958, 20 years old and bent on
a musical career. She began her studies with Claude Champagne
[composition] at ecole Vincent dIndy in 1960, and continued her studies
with Clermont PΘpin at the Conservatoire de musique de MontrΘal in 1963,
where she stayed until 1967.
Of course, these were overly interesting days in the fields of popular
music ù which turned poetic and even surrealistic with people like Bob
Dylan, descending on New York and the world from remote and backwards
Hibbing of Northern Minnesota ù and contemporary art music, where
creativity simply exploded at ù to just mention a couple of places ù San
Francisco Tape Music Center (Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Ramon
Sender, Donald Buchla!) and Mills College, if we're to stay in the North
American part of the world. Of course, in Europe there had been lots of
things going on in electronic and concrete music since the late 1940s,
with Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur and many others shaping audio art
that flabbergasted even the hip subterraneans of the avant-garde, but in
the 1960s this creativity and ingenuity practically exploded, spilling
over into mainstream cultural tendencies, and Stockhausen even appeared
on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper in 1967.
In these benign circumstances Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux
intensified her efforts. In 1968 ù the revolutionary year of Rudi
Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the May upheavals in Paris ù she headed
for the French capital at the suggestion of Iannis Xenakis, to study
electroacoustic music at one of the idiomÆs holy shrines; Groupe de
recherches musicales, where she worked with Franτois Bayle (turning 70
in March 2002!) and Guy Reibel. I can hardly think of a better time or a
better place to study mind-expanding and limit-pushing audio art than in
Paris at the GRM in 1968. That certainly was the right place and the
right time. The whole cultural atmosphere was permeated with the spirit
of will-do, with the feeling of anything being possible, and with an
exploding force of creative curiosity ù and in Germany the seeds of the
Rote Armee Fraktion (the Baader-Meinhof group) were sownà
However, Coulombe Saint-MarcouxÆs grand tour of famous teachers didnÆt
end with Bayle & Reibel. She in fact when to school with the great
grandfather of musique concrΦte; Pierre Schaeffer, at Conservatoire
National SupΘrieur de Musique in Paris. She also had private lessons
with Mr. Gilbert Amy. As a part of a five-composer initiative she
founded an electroacoustic entourage called Groupe International de
Musique ╔lectroacoustique de Paris, which traveled the horizons between
1969 and 1973. This woman had a lot of ingenuity and will.
Upon her return to Canada in 1971 she began teaching at the
Conservatoire de musique de MontrΘal, where she held a position until
her untimely death in 1985.
In Canada she kept very active, working to build an electronic music
studio of international stature, together with Gilles Tremblay and
others.
Her engagement in visual arts was intense, and she felt that she was
working sounds the way painters ù especially her acquaintance Marcelle
Ferron ù were working colors, and myself, IÆve always felt that much
electroacoustic music works just like non-figurative art does, or
Japanese calligraphy, or modern ballet of the touring dance companies.
Coulombe Saint-Marcoux took great interest also in poetry, theater and
dance.
Track 1 on this CD is a piece by the mysterious title Arksalalart⌠q,
conceived 1970-71. The piece starts like a wild, furious andà fun
sound-poetic pastime, or a street theater of sorts, voices and
electronic sounds rising and falling in clear-cut shapes. The voices
keep mingling with frictional rubber balloon sounds, grunting and
breathing, inhaling and wheezing! The music is very irregular, amassing
whatever came to mind, it seems, even adopting methods and nuances from
Donald BuchlaÆs Buchla, as it appeared in Morton SubotnickÆs early
works, and I can trace some of Pauline OliverosÆ experimental, long,
winding and merciless gutter gut sounds herein too, both in sounding
similarities and a kinship of idea, of concept, of artistic realization.
Fluttering electronic winds merge with Thomas Buckner-like vocal
expressions and earlier French sound-poetic wildman-stuff by Henri
Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck or Francois DufrΩne! Coulombe Saint-Marcoux
gets a lot ù a lot! ù into this comparably short piece; itÆs dense,
packed with ideas!
Meowing cat sounds turn on a sexy fragrance, which winds down in a
silence that soon is disrupted by iron-grinding metallic audio of the
kind we have experienced from Romania and its enfant terrible; Iancu
Dumitrescu; spectral music right in the bubbling, boiling middle of
Coulombe Saint-MarcouxÆs never-ceasing exploration, which nonetheless
cuts itself short by oozing down in a typical 1970s electronic echo
crack of the kind you might find in works by Rune Lindblad or Gottfried
Michael Koenig from that period.
Track 2 is Contrastances from 1971. Again, a frictional sound gets the
lot moving, and then the fast transitions take place again, from obvious
piano body sounds; lid banged shut, strings plucked (like had the
composer gained access to Ross BolleterÆs outback bar piano decaying
through the sunny, dusty decades of hot stuff Australia) ù to gushes of
steam or contact microphones attached to balloons (however that would be
done) and many breathing sounds or air pillar sounds, and perhaps
clarinets and flutes being played on the valves without any breath
pressing through the pipeà
All kinds of ôatmospheresö, i.e. different size spaces, giving off
different kinds of reverberation, are passed through, and Coulombe
Saint-Marcoux succeeds in getting a reverse Indian shahnai or perhaps a
regular European oboe appear extremely enjoyable and interesting, almost
having you wish she would have extended that one particular backwards
shahnai into a full-length piece all by itself; the sounds making me
feel so airy, flowing with the flow, some distances above the ground!
Slower replays of whatever source material ù appearing to me to be some
blown instrument ù growl deep down into shamanistic vibrations of mud
flows and inching giant glaciers, crevasses opening up in all
directions, sucking you down into a cold world of icy walls and an
assured preservation for future millennia, or maybe just a crushed,
mangled trace of a humanà Otherworldly, 2001 (the movie!) sounds have
you dance around the monolith, and on this mysterious time-space key the
piece winds downà
Track 3 is called MoustiΦres, and it was composed in 1971 as well. It is
a desolate and eerie landscape that opens up, winds tormenting you with
their chilly gusts and their gullies of sharp snow, reddening your
cheeks as you strive for an uncertain survival. On another plane, a
psychological or spiritual, the sensation still is one of danger,
perhaps to your sanity at the onset of schizoid tendencies or forced
thoughts ù or this could be the dark sounds out of the void that engulfs
you when youÆre lefty behind in a divorce, or when your child abandons
you. ItÆs dark, itÆs serious ù and the nature of the sounds is
sheet-steel-like, frosty, chilly, hard, rough-edged, at least up to the
point when voices, not unlike the vocal haphazard of track 1, are
introduced, somewhat altering the fearful impressions from before.
Still, however, these are sounds from Rauschenberg paintings; frames
with scratchy layers of white paint all over the rough canvas; lots of
surface imperfections and a crude statement of nihilismà perhapsà and if
this is a sensual perception of the Alps, I can hear the thoughts of
those giants - Matterhorn, Mount Blanc ù slowly twisting their
unimaginable weights in eon-long movements which upset the surface
tension of the whole planet over time, and Swiss maids walk up and down
those grassy flower-fat slopes under the summits, under the glaciers,
with goatÆs milk in their bucketsà
Track 4 has the title Zones, composed 1971-72. The thin line which
spreads out in a timbral band, spiraling on through empty space, is the
protruding electronics of Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux in one of its
most intriguing appearances, wherein the timbres grow and grow and shift
their spectra in myriads of little shining, glittering stars in the
grayish fabric of ôwhiteö noise, and the more you listen, the more you
sense particulars, details, small events inside the big scheme of
things, and speeds slowing down, different sections slowing down at
their own speed, turning and twisting and swaying the durations, the
pitches growling, howling, meowingà as loose bits of a piano sail down
in slow-motion around your listening area like fragmentary memories
through voids of amnesiaà
Hinges screech suddenly, a door opens on another layer of existence,
another strand of thoughts commences, electric insects flutter their
wings like high voltage speed freaks, and the sharp sounds tear at your
hearingà gleam in your earringà
Acoustic instruments share your attention towards the end, attack-less
tam tams or gongs without recession encircle the steadfast motion of the
general body of sounds, eventually winding down in a stooping glissando
which ends all soundsà
The last track ù no. 5 ù is dedicated to Franτoise BarriΦre and
Christian Clozier in Bourges, and itÆs entitled Constellation I, of a
much later origin than then other pieces, 10 years their junior,
composed in 1981. It has the longest duration of the works presented
here, with its duration set to a few seconds short of 19 minutes. Stark
strokes of the paint-brush, or of the sheet-steel with a steel brush,
shows the way through the successive rooms of darkness that have to be
passed, into a larger room where a haywire piano plays by itself, up and
down the registerà and I get visions or flashbacks of staircases and
attics, and staircases and cellars, the little window on top of the wall
the only escape from something lurking, something hiding inside the dark
cellar, or perhaps inside your closed mind, which badly needs prying
open, if only this nightmarish life could open up into something less
frightening, and when 15 minutes remain of this work a horse neighs
loudly through the canvas of the painting on which it is portrayed,
hardly visible in the comparative darkness of this house of many rooms,
and the reality of the room ù which feels unreal like the dress-code of
a schizophrenia conference in lap-top super city at the hard end of ages
ù seamlessly transforms into a reality beyond this reality, but which is
a consequence of this reality, and door after door opens up like in a
slap-stick Beatles movie, and this music really is a magical mystery
tourà Electrical charges shine in quick flashes through your cerebral
cortex (this is the music!) like meteors shooting across a winterÆs
night, calling for the wishes of untold numbers of human beings,
flocking through the darkness of the curving planetà and this is the
music of Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux too, but as it continues it is
molded into something else, and a fun-fair Donald Buchla, Morton
Subotnick machine-joy lever-lover kicks in and hoists us upward and
forward into further elegies of sexy sonics, wherein the listener surely
mourns the presence of this sound artist Coulombe Saint-Marcoux and her
swift mind and light hand, adjusting the pitches and the timbres in her
magic tool shed under the sky of Bourges in a June so far awayà Nature
sounds (birds, frogs, human thoughts made audible through a process of
identification) merge with instrumental sounds (flutes and what not) and
all the electronic wizardry of the early 1980Æs into an all-encompassing
celebration of existence through sound, brilliantly loved forth,
brilliantly loved alongà into an electronic khoomei sequence of the high
plateaus of the Tibet of your spirit, where you stand in the middle of
yourself, gazing up at the stars of an unfathomable space, an
irresistible life.
Ingvar Loco Nordin
______________________________________________________________________________.
01 Arksalalartoq 06:49
02 Contrastantes 06:38
03 Moustieres 09:45
04 Zones 09:06
05 Constellation I 18:40
. .
50:58 min
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