Un excellent quatuor d’improvisateurs en concert à la Casa del Popolo (Montréal) le 30 janvier 2003. Avec les musiciens Martin Tétreault (tourne-disques), i8u (électroniques), Michel F Côté (batterie, électroniques) ainsi que Magali Babin (pick-up de guitare et petits objets métalliques).

Did you ever stop in your tracks while cooking dinner to listen to the sonic possibilities of this pot or that pan? Well, you should. Magali Babin acted on this impulse and has since developed an art form out of kitchen utensils and discarded metal objects. Chemin de fer is her first album. The title means “railroad” but is more accurate when translated literally: “road of iron.” This is not bang-on-a-can noise. Babin studies metallic sounds up close, using close miking to capture all the subtleties of her tappings and scrapings. Her approach bears similarities with lowercase and microsound esthetics — indeed, she puts her “instruments” under the microscope. Looping, filtering, but most of all exploring all the sonorities contained in them, she improvises strange, captivating pieces. However odd they sound, they remain vaguely familiar. Triturations and Petit jardin stand out, simply because they take a form more constant and eventful than the other pieces. Jogging dans la maison hantée was created with producer Mario Gauthier and sound engineer Alain Chénier taking part (although their roles are not specified). Pluie de homards is an improvisation over the noise piece Rain by Ian Nagoski. Ma tribu begins with a simple sound (what?) and builds up to an abrupt end, Francisco López-style. L’entonnoir is the noisiest track, recalling some of GX Jupitter-Larsen’s experiments, but without the macho “subliming violence” vibe. Even in her harsher moments, Babin keeps her art under a feminine touch. Impressive.

Magali Babin is active on the Montréal sound art scene. Mr Dontigny of the No Type label lets on that it was almost by chance that this CD became the third (or second; the previous one was a double) issue with the No Type logo. Mr Dontigny happened to hear – just days prior to the label’s birth – that Magali Babin’s audio project at the CBC had been cancelled, and that she was looking for other venues of diffusion. As Mr Dontigny says; “the timing could not have been better,” and No Type signed Babin on.

The booklet – displaying the regular high-quality fold-out magnificence that is has in common with empreintes DIGITALes proper – explains that most of the sounds we hear on this set are derived from metallic instruments and objects (instruments being objects made with the specific purpose of being… instruments, while objects were made for other reasons, but demonstrating instrumental qualities as a by-product of their humble object existences… and the third alternative is the case of found objects which could be just natural findings like rocks and ice, which weren’t designed – I suppose… to act as sounding objects, much less instruments… but sound persistently anyhow and anyway!)

Most of the events herein are improvised by Magali Babin, with the exception of track 7, which was “crafted in joyous collaboration with Alain Chénier and Mario Gauthier”, and track 9, which has been mixed with the piece Rain from Ian Nagoski’s CD Warm Coursing Blood.

That said, on to listening!

The beginning is a start, but there is no actual beginning or end to this piece; Triturations… The sliding of rocks over rocks, granite across gneiss, or boulders over rock bottom expanses keeps on keeping on, and to me this sound world is the murmur of Time itself passing through these lonely worlds. The sounds are subdued but grave, humble but terrible – and these minutes of Babin time rubs off on your own calendar, making it obsolete in this vast void of minerals and millennia…

Track 2 – Petit jardin – is more French, more detailed, more microscopic, tingling, trickling and seeping… as little elves and fairies hover in the shadows over at the garden pond – and it makes me recall some worlds by Finnish guru electroacoustician Kaija Saariaho. There is a fair amount of deep wood enchantment in Finnish culture, you bet, and this property shines and shivers inside Petit jardin. Masterly, how Babin builds this dense atmosphere with sparse means in but a few minutes!

La corde is chordal in its attributes, you would have guessed! This comes close to some latter day guitar improvisations by the likes of Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth, even though I’m certain Babin did not use any guitar. The chordal elasticity and picking pluck feel is ever present, anyhow, and close mikings enhance the experience. It is indeed very nice, almost pick-pocketing, fingers moving about around those mashed up remains of chewing gum wrappings…

Number 4 – Monsieur et madame Watt – sports a thin, droning current of electricity, making me think of Joni Mitchell’s Electricity from For the Roses: “input, output, electricity…,” maybe for the lines that go: “she don’t know the system, plus she don’t understand, she’s got all the wrong fuses and splices, she’s not gonna fix it up to easy, the masking tape tangles, it’s sticky and black…” and so forth, and simply because of this humming current that could easily start emitting sparks and charges all over the room, and Babin’s very peculiar and amiable picking keeps up, like some old maid of the 19th century nervously picking and picking her apron while she waits for a secret lover or hell from her master. Babin’s piece once again gives rise to many fantasies and visions, which in my world is one of the best things I can say about music! Towards the end the electricity gets dangerous! Suddenly I wake up inside a power plant, the electromagnetic force field overwhelming…

5 – E – talks at me through the jerky and stiff jaws of tinplates or slabs of sheet metal, revealing some of the inner psychology of such materials. The metals are like drugged and just recently awakening ants on the inside of the hard matter. It has got to be the atomic jitter I’m sensing in this piece. On the other hand, sometimes this could appear to me like the slow motion rendition of tin can talk; all those truckloads of tin cans traveling all over the Americas, all over Europe, to reach those super market shelves… Is this their small talk in the road?

Havoc is administered on track 6 – L’entonnoir – in the manner of barrels rolling down endless slopes in some painting that Chagall never got around to do… but his age is the time of these events. It might even be winter, and black craws are flying up and fluttering around as the battalion of barrels roll and tumble on down like friendly but helplessly dangerous metallic speed freaks, in vain hoping – yes, thirsting! – for a valley which never comes, since this is the world of never-ending slopes… and the religion of tumbling barrels aims at the valley at the end of barrel existence…

Track 7 –Jogging dans la maison hantée — opens in a tweeting, tweaking manner, elastically, rubbery, forcefully seeping through cracks, emitting molten or mashed matter like hot rubber through the cracks of wooden horizons… The shrill sounds, which are rare here, sort of escape the tough goings-on behind and beyond those coniferous horizons, and the events that are hinted at and revealed in traces and remnants can’t be anything else but creation per se, or maybe a human mind finally at work with changing his views, trying to understand something else, and if so, it’s that something else that keeps tweeting and seeping through those wooden cracks, and I can already smell something; don’t know exactly what. Babin’s imaginative sound worlds are excellent mind tumblers!

Piece number 8 – Ma tribu – indeed conjures up pictures and archetypical memories of village get-togethers down the millennia of the African continent, rising in volume and presence to an almost painful drum dance across the dry, beaten piece of ground in the center of village and ceremony. A wheezing character of the drumming lets on its shamanistic, dream-like state, far on the inside of any real-time here-and-now occurrence, summing up the force and strength om the good medicine of thousands and thousands of years in one, wild, intense drum-beat, lashing out at you from the true state of Time…

The last entry on Magali Babin’s CD is Pluie de homards. First it appears like some early electroacoustic – or rather electronic – piece of ingenuity, but soon it travels into the realm of timelessness that seems to be the breathing air of the composer. The watery property is clear, but it’s massive, as if a closely miked gush of water at high pressure down a tin bucket! The force is magnificent and the speed immense! Overtones and obscure timbres swirl around the running water like a thick layer of gleaming, gleaning grains of sound and light. You name it, we like it!

This No Type release of the sound artist Magali Babin has is a true sonic adventure, revealing true ingenuity and artistic splendor!

Following the No Type compilation, three new disks from the real world collaboration between David Turgeon and DIFFUSION i MéDIA arrived at Ampersand Etc.

Magali Babin improvises her sounds on “metallic instruments and objects, which [she has] made, recycled or reinvented,” which go beyond the tin things pictured on the cover, as the notes also mention “a rather small electrical object… guitar pick up,” the mike placement has also had an important impact, as has “the studio work.” However, created originally for a radio show, the pieces here demonstrate the range of her constructions.

It opens with a more tentative, less structured piece that like many improv albums, tests the listener straight off. Triturations is an amalgam of shimmers pops scrapes twangs voicey-noises shakes subtleties and crackles that twists and changes adding thuds and winds in a complex electroacoustic weave of sounds of unusual colour and timbre. Petit jardin is more straightforward, alternating periods of a strumming with the sound of pebbles dropped in a bowl, with an overall chime, adding a scooping sound near the end. With my french, La corde is appropriately named – scraping and some plucking of a stretched wire accompanied by a percussive thud that sometimes sounds like a ruler being twanged. Monsieur et madame Watt has two components: an electronic buzz with becomes a wave and then a pulse over which there is a light percussive rumbling and scrabble. A tapping rolling scrape in E sounds like the microphone was inside a pipe being played, gradually speeding up, and into the big rolling percussion of L’entonnoir that forms a full-on assault over droning base and light playful tappings over. Jogging dans la maison hantée – was composed with Alain Chenier and Mario Gauthier (from the radio station): sighs and clicks run through as little noises explode over – scrapey rumble, high wail, rubbing noises – that ebb and flow returning wit stretched decay for a little big finale.

Dramatic flourishes of tapping and a fast rubbing increase in volume and speed in Ma tribu, eventually pulsating. And then the finale, Pluie de homards (which has been mixed with an Ian Nagoski piece apparently) a fabulous conclusion, verging on electro-noise as big hollow resonances whoosh over a light crackling clatter. And nicely completes the trajectory the album has created from its more finely grained opening.

An unusual and engrossing album. As you read the reviews of the others that make up this first batch from IMNT, it will be obvious that David Turgeon has maintained the unique eclecticism that made/makes the on-line label so fascinating. I hope that there is enough interest in the real world to allow the label to continue this musical exploration. For those in the know, the IMNT releases are packaged in the same card sleeves that are a little like upmarket cigarette packets. This allows for some interesting artwork and extensive liner notes, and maintains the tradition.

Nipping at the heels of the gripping and fugue-state-inducing eclecticism of the first No Type compilation, The Freest of Radicals, comes this incredible debut CD release from Montréal sound artist Magali Babin. Born in 1967, Babin combines linear yet sculptural metal-based sound pieces with a true flair for dynamism, abstraction and otherworldliness. Although Chemin de fer is the first appearance of material of this nature by her, she has apparently worked with soundscapes featuring the recording of metals for more than a decade now and, possibly as a result of this time-served honing of her skills, her utter control of the proceedings here is totally compelling. The constructions on this album were originally recorded for a radio show in Canada but shelved prematurely and, it would seem perhaps, unfairly. I have to admit I expected some element of coldness and isolation from this disc; but warmth, confusion, playfulness and apprehension all combine in Chemin de fer’s 50 minute journey and prove me wrong. At times, as on the opening Triturations and on E, the musical palette is of some vast, partly steam-driven and partly clockwork organism, respiring and shuffling at the limits of exhaustion; elsewhere, the album title is interpreted near-literally, as with the seemingly endless electrified rolling stock effect of L’entonnoir. These are impressive, intimate soundworks that cross the boundaries of acousmatic music, free improvisation, the pure sound of the gamelan, and early electronic composition methods, and yet retain a recognisable fingerprint that appears to be Babin’s alone. Let’s hope another decade is not allowed to elapse without more from this unique talent.

From: “JC JC” <james_39@h…>
Date: Fri May 10, 2002 4:12 pm
Subject: Magali Babin

I first became familiar with Magali Babin’s work when she performed in Baltimore, USA’s High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music in 2000, and was immediately attracted to her work. Magali is very active in Montréal’s vibrant experimental music and sound art scene, and primarily works with amplified metal/objects and transducers.

Acoustic/amplified/contact mic’d metal materials and metallic found objects have had an interesting history in experimental music/sound art/electroacoustic music, ranging from, for example, Harry Bertoia’s “Sonambient” sound sculpture recordings, Xenakis’ “Orient-Occident,” and Einstürzende Neubauten, among numerous others.

So i was looking forward to her new CD, Chemin de fer, on No Type. I got it a couple of days ago, and it’s been living in my CD player since then. In the face of the aforementioned history, I have to say that Magali’s take, approach, and resultant sonorities and sounds from her chosen sounds and objects are utterly unique and new. She manages to disclose small, mostly quiet, magical, mysterious little universes of sound. Another thing that emerges from listening to this work after enjoying the beauty of the pieces is how literate and articulate Magali is with her chosen materials and tools — there is a very broad language of sound in these recordings that will reward careful listeners. Added bonuses include the piece Pluie de homards which was mixed with the piece “Rain” from the CD “Warm Coursing Blood” by Ian Nagoski, one of the more interesting people working in drone these days, and beautiful packaging. I have a strong feeling that this disc is going to be one of the few releases each year that really speaks to me, and I’m already hooked.