Compact disc/digital, 2020, IMED 20165, available from empreintes DIGITALes, 4580, avenue de Lorimier, Montréal (Québec) H2H 2B5, Canada; telephone: +1/514 526-4096; email: [email protected]; https://empreintesDIGITALes.com.
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, better known as The Slave Ship (1840), is among Joseph M. W. Turner's finest paintings, and one of the most recognizable visual artworks of the romantic movement. Fused with the painting L'étoile noire (1957), by the founder of les automatistes Paul-Émile Borduas, it greets listeners of Annette Vande Gorne's latest acousmatic venture, Illusion, in the form of Luc Beauchemin's cover art, Seule issue (2020). The level of intertextuality is broad. Beauchemin's title hints at necessity. The cover art's contrasting frames of references, too, provide an air of calamity. It is difficult—one may say impossible—to free one image from the other, or to brush aside the many implications of these whispers, these overtones in...