Reissue of IMED 9004.

Above all…

The coming of the Montréal musiques actuelles/New Music America Festival in November of 1990 inspired us to underline this event with the production of a special disc, whose unifying concept would be a substantial artistic challenge to composers and that would compel electroacoustics to surpass itself. Therefore, we have commissioned twenty-five electroacoustic snapshots by composers from Québec, Canada, the United States of America and Mexico.

How then is this disc ‘new’? To merge popular song form (of a three minute duration) with the concept of the video-clip reactualizes electroacoustics by taking it out of the traditional concert hall and transporting it to the world of media, of clips, of miniatures, of the immediate… while still preserving the artistic integrity that electroacoustics command today. This disc is more than a collection of short pieces; it presents a synthesis of new electroacoustic creation as it is practised in all of its forms. Each minature is a summary of the style of each artist. A unique opportunity to visit and re-visit some of North America’s most dynamic composers.

We also launched another challenge with this production, this time to Québec City photographer Joanne Tremblay who produced the photographs. As with the composers, who were imposed a temporal framework, Joanne had a defined quantitative form to work with: twenty-five black & white photographs and one in color.

The presentation of the photographs and texts, on twenty-five mobile sheets, is meant to incite you, the listener, to listen to and to re-listen to these pieces in the order of your choice. We have put the works into a certain order for the disc, however this is by no means the only possibility. By programming your compact disc player you can create you own sequence of clips

—Jean-François Denis, Claude Schryer, Montréal, November 1990