Sylvain Lamirande combines intense, searching performances with intricate electronic textures and noises to create transparent layers of synthetic atmosphere and convincing digital structures in his album Rude Awakening.

Lamirande uses an intriguing mixture of analog and digital synthesizers and MIDI and acoustic wind instruments, creating a well-integrated texture that sounds simultaneously digital and human. Beyond the innovative synthesized sounds that would be relished by any heads-down programmer are organic, animated performances that warm the music with spontaneity and improvisation, blurring the lines between man and machine.

Twitching digital fragments pulsate and crawl across the stereo field like characters pacing back and forth on a stage, gradually dissolving into a slow build-up of sporadic buzzing, scraping and synthetic filtered washes, and finally climaxing in disintegrating outbursts. (Rude Awakening)

A slow, noisey glissando rises and falls with glitchy fragments falling off it's trunk, these tattered, scratching children eventually becoming larger figures that swallow their mother. They coo and sing sickly before and after their collision with a mad harpsichorist. (Presences)

The sounds are 3-dimensional; they have depth and space, moving across the stereo field as well as from back to front. They evoke a wide array of emotion, from solitude to disturbance to angst to longing.

But the most striking aspect of Rude Awakening is it's sense of searching, the way the performances and sounds wander and seek intricate paths to incomprehensible places. The sounds bend and ramble, but find their ways to definitive moments that provide structure and purpose. The beauty here is in following these sonic entities as their aspirations and directions are gradually realized in key events.