Christian Bouchard from Quebec is one who’s clearly very engaged with the world, its environment, its events, its inhabitants; on Broken Ground (noted in 2017) he applied himself to the concrete of modern urban architecture, and here on IV (EMPREINTES DIGITales IMED 23185) he does it with his observations on the language of the birds on ‘Birdscape’, also providing a compelling image of Montreal on ‘Portrait Montréal’ where through traversing the FM radio dial he manages to capture the hidden face of that city, exposing its true mental state with a stark honesty. In fact he gets to much the same place on ‘Montréal-Mafia’, where the original source recordings were provided by fellow sound-artists in that part of the world, who gave him 15 minutes of tape apiece to play with. In return, they received one cup of coffee.
Christian Bouchard may reassure us by naming all the locations in this queasy melange of speaking voices, alien tones and street-events, but there’s still a lurking darkness and mystery, which I hadn’t expected from this most benign and welcoming of Canadian cities. A strong set of recent works from this student of Yves Daoust. (01/06/2023)