Nicolas Bernier – The Dancing Deer EP

Electroacoustic artist, surround sound composer, occasional curator, old typewriter aficionado and sandcastle manufacturer…

Careless about aesthetic tags, Nicolas Bernier navigates through live electronics, installations and art video, as well as music for dance, theatre and cinema.

In the midst of this eclecticism, his artistic concerns remain constant: the balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sound sources and digital processing.

He is the founder of the sound art microorganism Ekumen, member of the media art organization Perte de Signal and the art director of Réseaux, a major Canadian electroacoustic concert producer. His works have been awarded and broadcast in festivals around the world including Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), AKOUSMA (Canada), Mutek (Canada), DotMov Festival (Japan) and Transmediale (Germany).

The Dancing Deer EP is described as Nicolas Bernier’s most “pop” record to date, and whilst the pop tag is fair it doesn’t fully convey the multifaceted and complex arrangements on offer in this three-track Home Normal release.

The release is a translation of a couple of months spent in the Canadian west, and there are certainly occasional hints of Northern air in the form of French female speech and submerged field textures (looped vocal song in first track ‘The Dancing Deer’ is a highlight). What’s most apparent, however, is the adroit mix that blends these textures around other more organic and conventional electronic tones.

More sonic collage than drone, and an adroit mélange of multiple competing layers, the project presents as the brasher but presentable side of acoustic electronic manipulation. The cover does hint at the playful and dislocatory tone, and captures the essence of the project well.  It’s also pleasant to hear a comparatively upbeat take on this sort of material too.

There are some unconventional and effective mixing tricks that I won’t spoil here – I will say that by midway through the first track I was well aware that the project is correctly described as pop (in that it is accessible and listenable), but also that it has a subtlety that would enable it to be also classed as more than that.

The EP is three tracks – ‘The Dancing Deer’, ‘The Dead Deer’ and an edit of the first track. Given that the first track stops just short of the twenty minute mark, it’s not a brief affair – track two also stops just shy of ten minutes, and presents a different side of the outing effectively.

Bernier’s CV is available as a download from his site, and the breadth of it gives an indication of the volume of his production of consistently well-received material. I have no doubt that many will regard this release as following in the same vein. The EP is released from Home Normal as a limited run of 300 in November.

- Review by Alex Gibson for Fluid Radio

Available soon through Home Normal & Experimedia

www.nicolasbernier.com
www.myspace.com/nicolasbernier
www.homenormal.com