Electro Traces Here On New Music Tour

Some editions of new music are more moving than others. With a brave new concert tour called Electro Traces that concept applies in several ways.

For one thing, with four composers and a small squad of performers, the national concert tour of new Canadian electronic/acoustic music, which stops here Friday night for one performance at Centre culturel franco-manitobain, looks more like one of those old rock ’n’ roll package jaunts than a mobile promotion for new music.

“We’re covering all the bases with this,” enthused tour co-producer Jean-François Denis recently between rehearsals for the tour’s third performance, at The Banff Centre for the Arts.

The concerts are only part of it. Electro Traces also promotes the new Montréal label empreintes DIGITALes, which has just issued CDs by the four touring composers — Christian Calon, Robert Normandeau and Alain Thibault, all from Montréal, and Vancouver’s Daniel Scheidt.

For this tour, the composers will appear with Claude Schryer (clarinet), Trevor Tureski (percussion), Jacques Drouin (piano) and Catherine Lewis (soprano). An untimely attack of flu prevented another performer, the visionary American trombone, electronics expert George Lewis, from appearing.

Denis, 31, whose own musical training includes seven years of classical guitar studies in his native Montréal, followed later by formal studies in electroaoustic music, formed empreintes DIGITALes with Claude Schryer about a year ago.

At first, he said, the idea was to stage one showcase concert at Vancouver’s Western Front Society to promote the CDs. Then came the chance to do another gig, and soon the troupe found itself “just hopping off around the country.”

The first shows last weekend in Vancouver went well, he said. “The public was good, the reception was good.”

The challenge, however, is to reach the mainstream audience that has little or no exposure to modern avant-garde music, especially in Canadian cities where there is no concentrated community of instruction and performance to support it.

Unlike many electronic-based works, which depend on prerecorded tapes and are thus essentially an audio experience, the music in Electro Traces is designed for live performance.

Some of the music is performed completely live, with conventional instruments. Other entries mix live performance either with tapes or with an interactive computer system. “We’re having all the types of electroacoustic music on this tour.”

With eight speakers and a mixing board, the tour sound can be arranged for any performance dimension — it sounded fine in the demi-sphere of the Montréal Planetarium, he noted — and also changed in terms of dynamic and spatial relationships, with the expressiveness of a pianist. “You can have a really different experience with the sound,” Denis said.

It should also be a different experience for those who expect such sonic explorers to be a grim and scholarly lot. “We’re very nice people,” he said chuckling.