Sound Polaroids

Chronique

Sound Polaroids: when electronica artists become tourists. Scanner and Tonne toured the world; arriving in a city a few days before a concert. The two were going sight-seeing, recording sounds and images, capturing a snapshot of the city. Filtered and processed, the sounds become the core of the live performance, while the visuals are integrated with an interactive installation -- images jerk and change in accordance to the live performance or to sound stimuli from the visitors. Sound Polaroids presents six tracks mixed from material from different shows: four by Scanner, one by Tonne, and one by guest Stephen Vitiello. The music is rather typical experimental ambient electronica: smooth, lush, full of clicks, strange disembodied sounds, and untampered field recordings. "London" is the most conclusive piece: the sound of Big Ben kicks it off, coming back processed and reassembled at the end. The "Milano Mix" and Vitiello's "New York City," are a bit more abstract but flow nicely, although they have few distinguishing features. The "Montreal Mix" is downright boring: Scanner comes back to his phone conversation-scanning self, but what he has selected is pointless (an argument about a bank account), and a snippet from the French version of the children's program Teletubbies closing the track is surprisingly gratuitous. Luckily, "Tonne Mix" concludes the audio portion of the disc with something playful and intelligent. An enhanced CD-ROM portion also includes a "responsive film," i.e. a set of images that will move to any sound file you play on your computer. It is a bit primitive (images responding to rhythm and wide pitch changes, wow) but it does give an idea of what the installation must have been like. All in all, Sound Polaroids is a correct album, nothing more.

© François Couture /TiVo