Now, this one is excellent. Beautifully atmospheric and melancholy, with stretched-out tones, trombone and gorgeous understated percussion all starting the proceedings. Some of this is very challenging, with brilliant use of hand percussion and odd sampled sounds, becoming like an electronic Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound or even Negativland at times. Some of the collaged sections are tremendous, with an uneasy strangeness alongside more floating gliding movements. By the way, I swear I heard a brief snippet of Marge Simpson’s voice in this!

In total contrast Chevreuil is a favourite of the label. A lot of it sounds like a classic 70’s experimental French LP to me. It’s really extroverted and joyous music, with some totally bizarre events, alien voices and disturbing noises turning into some absolutely crazy “songs”. The wealth of instruments and ideas on this CD all add up to a wonderful listening experience.

Obviously two companion releases. The first Chèvre is improvised guitar and drums, sparse, fragmented, folky, introverted, but not that interesting on the whole. There are some interesting sections though, if only the would let fly a bit more often!

Lussier (guitars) and Tétreault (turntables) battle it out on 21 tracks with titles all ending in “ur” or “ure”. There are some great textures and sounds here. It is extremely intense and noisy a lot of the time, but in turn can also be admirably restrained. Spontaneous ideas are picked-up and tossed around, or only fleetingly glimpsed at. At times it sounds like people just messing around with a bunch of stuff. Which, by the way, is a good thing!

Basically the concept of this is: a duo playing turntables, lots of scratches, pops, clicks and squeaks, and varispeed opera vocals in improvisation against clarinet. Okay, it sounds nice and interesting for a while, becoming tedious as the idea wears thin. A shame, as it’s a good Dada idea when it works, and the parts that do work sound really disturbing and “out there”.

A very weird mix of various sampled and looped craziness… mice squeak and transmute into rusted chair castors, with soundscapes that are so surreal that they took me to many realms; not least so that some of this sounds like out-takes from the Magic Roundabout. It does sound like lots and lots of other explorations in sound and noise as art, but this is a very good one. Some of this comes close to Ina-GRM releases that I’ve heard, which is no mean feat.