C’est officiellement annoncé, le public est invité à subir la «mégalomanie rafraîchissante» du duo électronique morceaux_de_machines le jeudi 20 mai 2004 dans le cadre du Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV). Pour cette occasion, les deux bruitistes seront accompagnés des vidéastes Boris Firquet et Éric Gagnon.

Samedi le 14 juin 2003 la salle Parral’œil (Rimouski) se transforme à jamais pour le passage de Machines: abstractions sonores électroniques. Après une prestation marquante à Mutek 2003, morceaux_de_machines s’unit de nouveau à Parasites (le duo de Diane Labrosse et Martin Tétreault) pour une aventure vers les sommets du bruitisme…

[…] Speaking of the No Type-ers… After what has been some public critique of Mutek, even on this list, No Type presented a label showcase at the Studio yesterday that enraptured the crowd, sucking them into a vortex of noise and improv electronic performances. […] No Type held attention despite the soundsystem’s relatively quiet range, with Samiland travelling a wealth of minimalist and dub territories, from sparse and deep broken beats to ambience, leading into the madness that was to follow: two sets of collaborative & improvised performances featuring A_Dontigny, first with the precise workings of veteran improvisational artist Diane Labrosse — on what appeared to be a theraemin device, at times; this performance was intricate, yet harsh in its metallic clamouring of sound-events. Then came morceaux_de_machines who, after an enthusiastic shout-out from Aimé, did not disappoint with his collaboration: vitriolic improvised noise from strange devices, high-pitched and jagged waves, from this real beast of a man, getting down and into it — morceaux grabbed the crowd and spun them round degree by degree. To end was Vancouver’s Coin Gutter, the enigmatic duo of Graeme and Emma carving out one of their more delicate and restrained sets, and, although improvised, moving through a taste of their sound, from experimental electroacoustic to noise, field recordings, media samples, and dark soundscapes. […]

Samedi le 8 mars 2003 à 22 heures aura lieu un événement qui fera trembler les murs de la Casa del Popolo (Montréal): pour la première fois le duo Parasites (Diane Labrosse, échantillonneur et Martin Tétreault, tourne-disques) affronte sur une même scène morceaux_de_machines (Érick Dorion et A_dontigny, ordinateurs) pour une soirée d’improvisation bruitiste capitale! Chaque duo est bien connu des mélomanes exigeants et, quoiqu’ils se soient déjà partagés la scène, il s’agit du premier concert des quatre réunis. Martin Tétreault a travaillé à plusieurs occasions avec Érick Dorion, dont un concert mémorable à la Salle Multi de Méduse en 2002. Diane Labrosse et A_dontigny sortiront ensemble un album sur l’étiquette No Type en avril 2003, Télépathie.

These laptop goblins make sure nothing is really sure anymore, as they bring the fuzzy principles of quantum mechanics and string theory into the world of binary sonics, played backwards in time, it seems, to the beat of sprawling chronometer meltdowns, clocks and spiders crawling away across cracks in the cement, time bent in on itself, curving ever deeper into spirit and matter, ever closer to the core of the NOW, as the minute, minuscule slices of time with their minute – but densely packed – fragments of lives are mangled through a wormhole in space-time with a Gargantuan might that distorts everything recognizable and well-known into pointillist approximations of an echo of the solid, bohemian safety of A Prairie Home Companion… individual remains of human lingual morphemes floating up into conscience in flaky dandruff residue – and I’m talking about music, don’t you forget, music right above the surface of dirty blue jeans and shimmering Macintosh interfaces, out of frantic, warm circuits in a mystery machine right out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – but DON’T PANIC!!!

The Quebec City radio show Napalm Jazz on CKIA–FM back in the mid 1990s constitutes the beginnings of the duo work of Aimé Dontigny and Érick d’Orion. The concept of the show was a wild mix of avant-garde, hip-hop, free jazz, electronics, found sounds and musics, which lays down the direction of the subversive workings of these guys up until this today, obviously providing enough creative force to keep them staggering down this wildman path!

The packaging is something extra here. It is made like regular empreintes DIGITALes covers, with a contraption of fold-out, hard, high-quality paper, but the art is overflowing and really compelling here, with demonic drawings by cartoonist Guy Boutin and wonderful water colors by Sophie Dowse. The whole impression of this package is one of bursting, overflowing, overpowering creativity. Flow with it or bend out of the way and hide, until it sweeps by!

In track 2 I actually find a more overarching, modal structure, in a bubbling frenzy which the mind glues together into a bead, a line, a melody of sorts, if only from a distance, as fractions of voices add a human touch, and the static of telephone lines through minus 40 Lapland wastelands wheeze and crackle through the human predicament with needy messages for a hungry ear beyond the weather…

There is nowhere to hide from this army of lightning rods inside your head, emerging from the core of Self, cutting away at your stray thoughts like a battalion of paper shredders in an office high-rise. Piano bar melodies are smeared all over the walls, as something gets back at something for something. We slide up against the back wall, easing sideways past the most awesome of goings-on, as the fish jump in frenzied electrocution in their center room aquarium, seconds before impact, as the avenger comes flying in, bent on avenging the 2nd, 3rd and 4th world, as he recognizes “the disgusting thing that causes desolation standing in a holy place” [Daniel 12:11 & Matthew 24:15], and Armageddon is on…

Track 3 brings hallucinatory voices into a woman’s warmth and shelter (Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood, when blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud, I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form; ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’ [Bob Dylan]) as skin peels descend like soot-flakes from an arson epidemic all across the parking lot as you run and keep on running, away, away, away…

I get the idea that these sounds may be what alien civilizations on forlorn worlds out of thinkable reach may one day find as the electromagnetic remains of our moment in time on Earth, the distorted transmissions from a died-down culture, a faded-away species, soar past their receivers scanning their cold skies for traces of spiritual spurs down the galaxy clusters and beyond…

morceaux_de_machines is a virtual dream machine, injecting the listener with such a wild array of visions that peyote and mescaline becomes futile accessories. Aimé Dontigny and Érick d’Orion have found a modern, high-tech backdoor into age-old shaman rites and magic otherworldly experiences – which goes to show that each time in history has it’s on way of boring into the layers of consciousness, towards pre-intellectual domains of bliss and wonder. When genuine and authentic medicine men of contemporeana (for example lap top wizards) take on this feat as seriously as morceaux_de_machines, the means are there, installed, up and running, for anyone with a clear ear to utilize – and I do, with the pleasure of a whooopeee mind rider!

Comment ne pas s’intéresser à deux jeunes artistes dont le premier groupe avait eu la pertinence de se baptiser Napalm Jazz, (également émission de radio), échos lointains des Naked City côtoyant les assauts digitaux de Merzbow. morceaux_de_machines se fait un malin plaisir à brouiller les pistes, à tel point qu’on ne sait vraiment plus si ils ajoutent du bruit à la mélodie ou si ils restreignent le bruit à la mélodie. Acharné de l’improvisation, le duo canadien se lâche volontiers, citant au passage l’Art du bruit de Luigi Russolo ou Anthony Burgess (Orange mécanique) pour soutenir leur discours, leur évocation libre de la création artistique. À cheval entre l’ambient, le jazz, le hip-hop baclé et le bruit blanc, morceaux_de_machines tisse des atmosphères tendues, catharsis numérique de processeurs furibonds et de lignes de programmation effrénées. Paradoxalement, leur musique n’est pas sans évoquer les productions de Deathprod sur Biosphère ou d’un Stock, hausen & walkman remixé par Kevin Drumm… Dontigny et d’Orion se détachent de ces références en gardant une spontanéité et un abandon de soi à leur art. Ou une manière habile de garder le sourire en se bouchant les oreilles.