Nicolas Bernier, Les Arbres (No Type)

text

A real coffee-table book of a package. Housed in its handsome slipcover are a slim CD case and six quality postcards, each featuring a montage by visual artist urban9, with its title on the back.

Each title naturally corresponds to a complementary track by composer Nicolas Bernier. The idea behind this project was to collaborate over disciplinary boundaries, allowing the images to inspire the music and the music aid in assembling the visuals. If I understand correctly, this give-and-take process went back and forth through to a final revision.

The montages of urban9 are composed on grey on grey backgrounds with patient balance and painful symmetry, which becomes all the more apparent the deeper you look into each image. At the centre of each but one stand photographs of children, removed from their original context in some family album from the Victorian age or the 1940s, to judge by their clothes. In some, faces shine brightly, even preternaturally, while in others they are partially or wholly obscured. Gazing deeper into the frame there are the eponymous trees, of course, featured in every piece. But the trees are uniformly denuded, bereft of leaves and possibly also of life. Gaze even deeper and you find ghost writing, flower X-rays, an owl, and other eggingly incongruous elements, all drawn together to form a very cohesive whole. If I had to pick a favourite, it would be the second image, "This is a Portrait", with its young schoolboy cradling a lamb in his arms, unexpressive eyes fixed directly on the photographer´s lens, impatient to get this over with.

I am also very attracted by the music for this piece, which features longtime Bernier collaborator Delphine Measroch on accordion and cello with Bernier on guitar and "audio transfiguration". This piece is as truly murky and deep with layers as urban9´s visuals.The strings and accordion even add a hint of French-Canadian folk music, if only by mere presence rather than express style.

With his computerized hammer and chisel, Bernier has sculpted each piece out of sparse instrumentation - a guitar or two, some brass, piano, strings and the above-mentioned squeeze-box.

At times his interpretations are much more literal - "sound-effect-y", if I may coin an unwieldy term - than expected, or necessary. When this happens it appears that more restraint at the computer keyboard would have been preferred.

However, most of the time his electronics complement his acoustics admirably, lending them just the right patina. Les Arbres is gloomily enchanting, for example "Piano", where the thoughtful depression of a deep piano note is allowed to swell and subside before venturing a new one. "Bora", an "audio bricolage" according to the composer, is not my favourite track - too much of the sound-effectery mentioned before - but the foghorn rumble he has his sampled trombones emitting is almost physically seductive. The sentimenal violin of Pierre-Olivier Gaudreau on the closing track (perversly titled "Ouverture") is peppered with very unsentimental electronic debris but this sonic juxtaposition only works to enhance the feeling of oneness between the visual art with its layered depth and the musical art´s similarly stratified sonic geography.

An exciting, possibly even profound work from a young composer, and an introduction to the work of one very interesting visual artist.

http://www.notype.com