Nicolas Bernier
Transfert / Futur
CANADA ACTE 02 CD (2018)
Passing Autechre/Ryoji Ikeda resemblance from prolific sound artist and technical wizz Nicolas Bernier, whose new EP’s 30-minute proportions tremble beside earlier work: 2015’s Frequencies boasted 100 tracks of audio to a light installation featuring kinetic visualisations of particle-level scientific order: what Carsten Nicolai and his friends do when they’re not scoring big budget movies. Generative too, probably. But there’s an awful lot packed into transfert/future as well, and better odds of listening through a few times before calling it a day. Constituent sounds are diverting but ephemeral – complex arrays dazzling IDM tropes so fleetingly displayed that the event phases by as a blur of warm impressions; unfurling new textures, timbres and quasi-techno rhythms into 4/4-tamed senses, and while it may take unpacking, it’s unstable enough to withstand comparison to respectable peers.