Préparez-vous à un déferlement de sensations intrigantes et dérangeantes qui visent à vous stimuler mentalement. La partition composée par Nour Symon pour Je suis calme et enragé·e atteint son but, elle nous propulse en terra incognita en complément des poésies brumeuses écrites par Roxane Desjardins.

Ce sont avant tout les voix de Zéa Beaulieu-April, Gabriel Dharmoo, Laura Doyle Péan et Vincent Ranallo qui contribuent à la réussite de ce projet transdisciplinaire. Étourdissante, la conception lexicale s’intensifie perpétuellement comme en témoigne la deuxième partie de Je mourrai dans une pièce fermée. L’équilibre entre les déclamations vocales et les instrumentistes rehausse les explorations de Nous étions masques, miracles, empêtrées dans l’enthousiasme qui brille par sa théâtralisation. Des bribes de jazz s’insinuent dans le matériau musical imprégné par le sérialisme. L’esprit de Don Cherry est colporté par l’un des transfuges du Montréal-Toronto Art Orchestra, le trompettiste Craig Pedersen, qui émerge malicieusement de la masse orchestrale dans Ils ont dit que le ciel se couvrirait d’aiguilles. Cette composition animée par un enchaînement de mutations sonores s’étoffe avec les vifs coups d’archets administrés sur les cordes de Guido Del Fabbro, Émilie Girard-Charest et Stéphane Diamantakiou. Le déroulement de la totalité de l’œuvre déclenche une succession de chapitres partagés entre la tension et la détente, ce qui génère des surprises instantanées.

Le Printemps érable de 2012, grève étudiante la plus importante de l’histoire du Québec, de même que le désastre écologique en cours, nourrissent des interactions entre la phonétique française et un matériau sonore élaboré. Si une forme de désespérance se répand dans le concept de cette création, Nour Symon et Roxane Desjardins magnifient leur dialogue atypique qui vise à l’harmonie universelle.

These 6 tracks from Nour Symon showcase 4 vocalists who intone the music in chorus, plus 2 instrumental soloists from Collectif Ad Lib as well as by 6 instrumentalists from Ensemble SuperMusique.

Nous étions masques, miracles, empêtrées dans l’enthousiasme begins with a droning backdrop amid many voices that talk and sing, while the brief bouts of music is used sparsely, and J’espère être absoute follows with both dramatic and gentler moments, where strings are manipulated with much atmosphere.

Affalée sur le sol occupies the middle spot and is firm, nearly harsh, in its tense and emotive presence that employs guttural vocals, though it’s the 12 minutes of the highly experimental and ambient Ils ont dit que le ciel se couvrirait d’aiguilles that’s worth the price of admission, as voices are used like instruments and instruments are gestured with sci-fi tendencies.

Il n’y a rien à dire sur l’humanité exits the listen, and it’s a harmonic and percussively strong finish that builds into dense layers of strings, brass and winds.

A truly iconoclastic affair that embraces noise, poeticism, jazz and chamber nods, Nour Symon’s vision is entirely their own, and that’s a big part of the appeal.

Symon Henry? Nour Symon? ’They’ sind ein Egypto-québécois Composer, Soundpainter und Poet, ’deren’ Graphic Score „Voir dans le vent qui hurle les étoiles rire, et rire“ das Ensemble SuperMusique unter Leitung von Danielle Palardy Roger auf „ Voir dans le vent… “ (AM 251) zu Gehör brachte. Und ebenso Je suis calme et enragé·e (AM 281), zu siebt intoniert mit Flûtes, Trompette, Violon, Violoncelle, Contrebasse & Percussions, zusammen mit dem Collectif Ad Lib als Stimmquartett, verstärkt mit Synthétiseurs & Harmonica. Um in bruitistischer Dramatisierung sechs tableaux sonores mit Poesie von Roxane Desjardins zu performen: Nous étions masques, miracles, empêtrées dans l’enthousiasme — J’espère être absoute — Affalée sur le sol — Ils ont dit que le ciel se couvrirait d’aiguilles — Je mourrai dans une pièce fermée — Il n’y a rien à dire sur l’humanité. Zu einem auf Leinwand (→youtube) graphisch durchlaufenden ’Klang’-Faden und Texten von Desjardins zur Klimakrise und zum ’Ahornfrühling’, dem Studentenstreik in Quebec 2012. Die handgeschriebenen Zeilen werden gesprochen, deklamiert, Emotionen werden vokalisiert. Diagonale und vertikale Striche lösen wütende Schreie aus und entsetztes Ersticken. Farbige Verdichtung und Verdunkelung in der twomblyesken Graphik stoßen zu crescendierender Emphase an. Daneben Katzenjammer, leise Trauer zu verblassten Aquarellen, triste Sätze über trübe Aussichten. Und wieder, mit schmetternder Trompete, Dramatik und Zorn. Mit bitterem Fazit, von Baritonstimme, Rezitation, fauchenden Lauten. Die Zukunft verbrannt, erstickt, das Überleben in Frage gestellt. Ein absolut packendes Statement!

After a solo album and two quartets, it’s time for a large line-up, here twelve to be exact, pieced together from two formations. There is, of course, also a composer, here inspired by some very contemporary poems. And it is impossible not to give the album credits. Je suis calme et enragé·e (I am calm and angry), is a transdisciplinary piece that begins with these exact words by Roxane Desjardins. This ambitious yet fragile project presents six sound paintings — visual music scores composed by Nour Symon — for six poems exploring positions of distress and malaise in response to History, the scale of humanity and looming environmental disasters.

The wholly monumental, meta-opera work opens with a balanced but already quite expressive polyphony, underpinned by a low-kneed string narrative. Electronica reigns in the background, building tension, asking questions, occasionally inspiring. The dense, edgy storytelling, however, is not devoid of a note of mysterious reverie. The second movement is initially a kind of lazy muscle-stretching — the instrumental-vocal flow seems to flow a little higher. It quickly gains power and explodes with the force of a free-jazz orchestra. In the foreground, however, is the narrator, who distributes roles and enforces commitments with a firm voice. Things get definitively edgy in the third movement — shouts, instrumental salvos, broken, twisted rhythms, operatic highs and decadent lows.

The beginning of the fourth poem is woven with instrumental trifles. Trumpet, flute and strings all have their roles here. A pack of churlish vocalists doesn’t appear until the fifth minute and begins to wreak considerable havoc. Here is the drunken crew on the side of a wave-swept ship starting quite a party. The whole thing resembles a well-predefined… free improvisation. The climax is as melodic and post-baroque as it is raspy and shrill. The fifth story is sometimes a prayer, sometimes a studied meditation, it oozes melody and filth. The narrator plays his or her important role willingly, although everyone here can shout, sing and feel the scent of a shared journey. The story effectively builds up and transforms into an almost freejazz pile-up. The beginning of the final poem is droning — vocal, stringed and underpinned by anxious harmonics. The story transforms rather quickly into an edgy, theatrical polyphony, remaining cooled in the instrumental layer, though steeped in mysterious rhythms. The rocking meditation eventually encounters a chorus of angry lunatics, refugees from a burning opera house. This vocal peak implies more activity on the part of the instrumentalists. The finale of this frenzied performance is free, expressive, played with a full ensemble, with voices that seem to cede the field to the instrumental sphere on the final straight.

Translated from Polish.

Put out on the circuit via the Ambiances Magnetiques imprint as their cat.no. 281 on March 7th, 2k25 is Je suis calme et enragé·e, the second full length album conceived for the label by composer Nour Symon who delivers a total of six pieces over the course of 57 minutes, performed by an entire ensemble of artists on both classical and electronic instruments of which some are operating under the name of Ensemble SuperMusique, with lyrics written and provided by poet Roxane Desjardins which, given our admitted lack of knowledge of the French language, to us provide just another sonic layer without being able to dive deep into their meaning. This being said, the opening piece that is Nous étions masques, miracles, empêtrées dans l’enthousiasme opens on a pretty intense, brooding and dissonant tip with its rumbling, low end-heavy Dark Ambient movements, sharp and somewhat angry poetry citations and nerve-wrecking dynamic bursts setting the vibe for the subsequent cut J’espère être absoute following — as well as the rest of the album — on a similar path leading ever deeper into deepest depths and hidden subsurface vaults of what could be described as unsettling, explorative, nightmare inducing and unsoothing Avantgarde music, probably even crossing the fringes of sanity at times as far as proper ’ensemble music’ might go for the untrained listeners ear, bringing forth spine-tingling scrapings, warped sirens blown over from afar, crossing barren lands whilst regular instruments — or better: regularly used instruments — only occasionally emerge out of hyper-dense sonic swamps before disappearing into the dark once again where joined by skittish creatures and ominous entities never seen by anyone, yet still being anchored as tell tale factualities in stories our elders have been told about many many centuries ago. This album is a werkschau of contemporary Avantgarde of the highest order and sonic intensity, for a niche audience only and not to be consumed by fractured and broken souls for many a reason. Keep away from minors.

Je suis calme et enragé·e (I am calm and angry) by Egyptian-Québécoise Nour Symon is a plunge into strangeness. A musical strangeness carried by an almost noisy score made up of infernal vocalizations and acid sound waves, electronic and acoustic, which support the often intense declamation of expressionist poetic texts by Roxane Desjardins. The result is an existential manifestation of presence in the world, inspired initially by the 2012 Printemps érable in Quebec, the moment of the ‘genesis of the project’, according to Symon. Echoes of Diamanda Galas are perceptible in this demanding and disconcerting work.

Nour Symon is undoubtedly one of the boldest musical voices in contemporary Quebec, one of those who dares to go the furthest. Her creative language is an uncompromising assault on the prevailing conservatism.

It’s the kind of music that sadly drives away the traditional mass media, and makes those like PanM 360 so indispensable.

Translated from French.

Nour Symon’s orchestrated and instigated reification of angst, rage and activism speaks just as much about the present decade’s movement against authoritarianism, the State commodification of education and health, and the erosion of civil rights as it does about this work’s main inspiration, the “Printemps érable” protests of 2012.

You could say that the expressions, the sonic and orchestral devices, the use of voices and poetry, of manifesto and barricade rattling are all just as prescient in the aftermath of the pandemic as they were thirteen years ago when a groundswell of support grew up around demonstrations against the proposed doubling of tuition fees in the province: increasingly expanding the remit, widening the disgruntlement, everyone from labour unions to environmentalists, leftists and marginalised groups ended up supporting a growing resentment, the ranks of which numbered around 250,000 at its peak.

Despite various setbacks — the lockdowns had a knock-on effect for this project, forcing an abandonment of the original plan to work with the Montérégie Youth Symphony Orchestra — the Egyptian-Quebec composer transforms the energy and directs an abstract despair into an avant-garde electroacoustic and experimental voiced theatre of the absurd, dramatic, expressionist and pained. In many ways a cross-generational grief and pull of despair, political activism and action, this album’s notable contemporary poet collaborator Roxanne Desjardin draws upon the 1980s and 1990s countercultural writings of the iconic Quebec poets Denis Vanier and Josée Yvon.

Ambitious and covering a multitude of disciplines from visual and text art (a graphic score was conceived to communicate the concept) to performance, orchestral transmogrification, opera and video, I am calm and angry uses a host of renowned, prize nominated poets, soloist musicians and ensembles; far too many to mention in detail here, but all integral to conveying the very real emotional maelstrom and rage of protest. Across six tracks, divided liberally into the Ensemble SuperMusique and Collective Ad Lib groupings, mewling, contorting, accented, untethered, enunciated and experimental theatre-like voices circle and ride the contours, rises and quirks of a fusion between the classical avant-garde, experimental arts, Musique concrète, and, of all things, a removed version of freeform jazz.

Recognisable instruments from the wind, strings and brass sections join together with artistic impressionistic symbolism, percussion and electronic elements to evoke forebode, the unearthly, dramatic, mooning, unbalanced and abstract. Reference points within that overlapping sphere of influences and musical threads/connections includes (to these ears anyway) Charlie Morrow, Stockhausen, Cage, György Ligeti, Xenakis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and on the heralded, whip-cracked and concertinaed collective agonised ‘I will die in a closed room’, a strange fusion of Alex North and The Drift era Scott Walker.

Unbalanced with the ground constantly shifting below, the tumultuous and agitated are invoked and revoked in a musical experiment of plummets, falls and rises. A mix of French, amorphous and descriptive languages is adopted in a successful attempt to merge the poetic arts with protest, manifesto and performance, whilst physically stimulating the emotions and trauma of such protest.