Christian Bouchard - IV [Empreintes Digitales]

Released on July 1st, 2k23 via the long standing label Empreintes Digitales which saw its first release popping up on the circuit all the way back in 1990 is "IV", the - obviously - fourth full length album outing cooked up for the imprint by Quebec-born composer Christian Bouchard. Presenting a total of five extended pieces over the course of roughly 69 minutes Bouchard covers compositions conceived over a period spanning from 2014 to 2022, opening with the spatial unsettling pulses of "Birdscape" which combine playful Electronica blips and chirps, elements of Noize-informed Industrial Electronics and lo-fi data transmissions in a well fascinating, almost sci-fi-leaning manner whereas "Portrait Montreal" focuses on vantablack tectonic shifts, tense atmospheres and a collage of cut-up radio communication samples reminiscent of Robin Rimbaud's Scanner project as well as heavy sonic bursts of Musique Concrete x Plunderphonics. The subsequent "UHF-Complex" brings forth a brittle, slightly nervous and stripped down fusion of Ambient, Deep Listening Music and Clicks'n'Cuts-referencing glitches - think early Oval works here - alongside irregular low end rumbles, "Montreal-mafia" fully focuses on collage-techniques, reprocessed Field Recordings and similar electronic interventions whilst the final cut named "Nombres Et Silences" pairs ever shifting scrapes and crackles with reverberating electronic textures seemingly resembling the deepest and most threatening subsurface vaults to be found on icy, hostile exoplanets located somewhere in a galaxy far far away. Good stuff.

Album artwork on Instagram!