The film Un Cargo pour l’Afrique (A Cargo for Africa) won Best Canadian Feature at Montreal’s 2009 World Film Festival. This prize is voted by the public, and it should help this humble film reach a wider audience. Who Sank The Titanic (also known as Titanic: How It Really Sank), another film which features my music, is nominated in the Best History Documentary Program category of the 2009 Gemini Awards (Canadian television).
I’m proud to say that my new solo electroacoustic music DVD is now out on Montreal’s empreintes DIGITALes label. It was a real joy to be able to have such great artists as Fortner Anderson, Khrystell Burlin, Delphine Measroch and Christian Olsen collaborate with me. The dvd, in both stereo and 5.1 surround sound, features many urban field recordings that are used both as decor and serve as main subjects of my deranged sonic experiments, hence the title (City Scraper) It also contains the art video The Lighthouse, for which I wrote the soundtrack. You can buy the dvd-audio and listen to excerpts by clicking this link.
The DVDs released by Empreintes Digitales don’t contain images, but highly quality music, to be selected as stereo or 5.1 surround sound. In the past I complained about the lack of difference between the various releases on this label, with some exceptions, but the release by Ned Bouhalassa is something different. Bouhalassa has a background as a composer for films and TV series and is from Montréal. He doesn’t seem to belong the academic world that usually inhabits Empreintes Digitales. He works much more like the others around with loops of sounds, more regular synthesizers but every now and then also throws in some breakbeat rhythm. At the same time he uses field recordings (street sounds, natural sounds) and the length of the pieces is not entirely pop song either. The combination of all of this makes this quite a surprising [disc], a great one for this label. Modern electronics without the pretensions, the same idiom and such like. Nice one indeed.