Listening to the works of Jean Piché, Canadian electronic music pioneer and video artist, is like walking into your own personal IMAX theatre, closing your eyes, and seeing what pops up behind your eyelids as you journey through the Amazon or watch a store being born or get stuck wandering inside a giant, pulsating womb. Piché’s minimalist electronic soundscapes take you there, maaaaaaan; listening is like meditating, but without all the hard work of making yourself not think and being afraid your roommates are gonna hear you doing some Enigma-style Gregorian chanting all weird and alone in your room. In short, his work is challenging, innovative, and fantastic.
Piché has taught electroacoustic music composition at the University of Montreal for the last few decades, all while building a rep as a software developer and audiovisual artist. But in a time long, long ago (the 1970s) and in a galaxy far, far away (Vancouver), dude was in college at Simon Fraser University, working on an LP made up of computer, digital synthesis, and acoustic jams. Called Heliograms, the album contains a track called “La mer à l’aube,” which has the distinction of being one of the first ever digital synthesis pieces produced in Canada. And like lots of long forgotten cool stuff and Great Art, Heliograms got lost in space when the small record label that had released it in 1982 went bankrupt.
Fortunately for music historians and fans of really freakin’ cool electronic music, Heliograms is getting a re-release through Digitalis Recordings in late May. Yankee guitarist/producer James Plotkin (Khanate, OLD, sunn 0))), ISIS) has remastered the album from ye olde original tapes, and the recordings have been magically transubstantiated into vinyl LPs. To accompany the release, Piché has created two new video projects for album tracks “Ange” and “Rouge.” No word on premiere dates for those videos yet, but you can check out excerpts from the album here:
• Digitalis Recordings: http://www.foxydigitalis.com/rec_index.html
