All else being equal, I love listening to electronic music. For me it's a medium so full of potential for discoveries in time and expressivity, to name only these, that I sometimes don't mind too much if this potential isn't quite realised to a life-changing extent. So the prospect of listening through these six CDs on the Québecois label Empreintes DIGITales of music by six composers whose work I hadn't previously encountered was an exciting prospect, and one which I'm happy to report broadly lived up to expectations.

Ana dall'Ara-Majek (b. 1980, Paris) describes her Nano-Cosmos cycle as ‘dedicated to insects, small arthropods and microorganisms’, and somehow the idea of a world of microscopic entities and events magnified to fill the field of vision seems to be something idiomatic to the acousmatic domain. The first and earliest piece, Akheta's Blues (2013), referring to the song of the cricket, superimposes rapidly active sound materials with slowly changing planes of sound in a way which is familiar from points of reference in the repertoire, and in particular the work of Bernard Parmegiani, although its often quasi-orchestral richness has an attraction of its own, which it shares with the other compositions on her album. Alongside such expansive vistas are often to be found clicks and glitches that mark out the music as belonging to a younger generation, and also quintessentially surreal juxtapositions of ‘concrete’ materials, particularly in the fourth piece, Pixel Springtail Promenade (2015), where they often give the impression of presenting an insect's-eye-view of the human world – huge, incomprehensible, uncomfortably close and somewhat threatening. I'm not sure that the five pieces in this cycle really carve out individual profiles of their own, or on the other hand that they accumulate into an impression of a single large-scale work, but the sonic regions through which the music passes are never less than fascinating and often breathtakingly beautiful.

Sophie Delafontaine (b. 1988, Lausanne) is the youngest composer represented on these CDs, although paradoxically her work is the most comfortably situated in the sounds and forms of the musique concrète tradition, where recorded materials (the voices of birds, and of humans both speaking and singing, the sounds of water, wind, and breathing) are multiplied, reverberated and otherwise spun out in time to merge with each other and with sustained synthetic textures. The music seems to embody an externalisation in sound of personal memories, fanciful thoughts and anecdotal fascinations, giving these pieces an engaging sense of intimacy and openness which serves eventually to draw the listener away from being distracted by their clear indebtedness to the more ‘impressionistic’ side of the tradition, as represented by the work of composers such as François Bayle. Nevertheless, this music didn't generate that exhilaration of previously unheard and unimagined sounds or sound-combinations, which, though not necessarily an essential component of the acousmatic experience, can be one of its principal attractions. I found myself too often listening to recognisable techniques rather than the musical world they were trying to invoke.

One of the most interesting aspects of contemporary electronic (as opposed to vocal/instrumental) composition is the way in which it often generates creative interfaces with the less commercial kinds of popular music, which after all employ very many of the same techniques and approaches to sound, to an extent which perhaps hasn't been the case since the early 1970s. One of these interfaces is in the area of ambient music, whose origins are usually traced to the coining of the term by Brian Eno in the mid-seventies, although as the genre has developed it has come to owe at least as much to earlier examples like Wendy Carlos's album Sonic Seasonings (released in 1972). The CD Oscillations planétaires by the Canadian Chantal Dumas (b. 1959), consisting of a single 50-minute piece in nine movements, in particular invites such a comparison. Each movement takes its title from a geographical phenomenon (earthquakes, geysers, the process of mountain formation, and so on) which might give an idea of the kinds of wide-screen rumblings and undulations that underpin the music. These are combined with sustained harmonies using unashamedly off-the-shelf cinematic synthesizer sounds, Shepard-tone textures à la Jean-Claude Risset, glistening arpeggios and portentous piano octaves, and a liner note that reads like the script of an Earth-viewed-from-space documentary. I was reminded of the distinction Gottfried Michael Koenig makes between ‘composing sound’ and ‘composing with sound’. The sounds of Dumas's work aren't significantly more ‘composed’ than they might be in the context of a more or less conventional orchestral score. While the skill and fluency brought to bear on composing with them often leads to momentarily attractive results, too often for this listener the vision is then spoiled by harmonic and timbral clichés rising to the surface of what had sounded like promisingly strange textures.

The music of Dumas's compatriot Monique Jean (b. 1960), however, is on an entirely different level of originality in both structure and sound, arising from an exploration of the instabilities of analogue and no-input sound generation techniques. Her album Troubles consists of two continuous pieces whose precisely calibrated but tenebrous, mysterious and bleak textures formed for me the most attractive and thought-provoking listening experience on this batch of CDs. Coming to it immediately after Oscillations planétaires I was struck immediately by the way that Jean fuses sound and form into a distinctive means of expression that is only possible in the electronic medium – ‘simultaneously organic and urban’, as she points out in the note accompanying the first piece T.A.G. (2013). On the rare occasions when something that can be interpreted as an interval or a pitch-sequence or even a more or less familiar timbre becomes audible, its context has ensured that it's heard as if alien – an unsettling déja vu rather than a prefabricated memory. The second piece, Out of Joint (2011), is intended to evoke Shakespeare, and specifically Macbeth, through the prism of Peter Brook (who seems to me surprisingly seldom referenced by composers, given that so many of his insights into theatre are equally applicable to music) and the history of its staged and cinematic realisations, which might lead the listener to expect the spoken voices that are so regular a feature of music in the concrète tradition. However, not a single voice shows itself; what is heard for most of its duration, in fact, is a stormy disquiet where it's occasionally possible to hear the outline of something – but what? – through an indistinct fog of noise. A brief chorus of crows seems to be the only direct link to natural sound. It's not the Shakespeare that's ground down into the easily digestible material of school curricula, but the one whose blasted heaths and fatal instincts must have been an even more startling exposure of human darkness in the early seventeenth century than they still are now.

Cercles et surfaces (2012) by the Argentinian composer Elsa Justel (b. 1944) opens with finely spun threads and wavelike surges of sound, and rain-like precipitations of sound-grains reminiscent of the work of Horacio Vaggione, although Justel's deployment of such elements is spacious and transparent where Vaggione's soundworld is typically densely packed. I'm not sure I hear ‘circles’ as a primary component of the music, which seems rather to concentrate on varying combinations of smooth and highly perforated surfaces. Its successor L (2003, the L stands for Lucretius) juxtaposes spoken voices, quoting from diverse authors at different distances and degrees of transformation, with mostly punctuative sounds from instruments, other sound-producing objects and animals. The non-vocal material is, as the composer puts it, ‘seasoned with tango’, with the tendency that much tango music has to disintegrate into an almost disjointed sequence of phrases taken to a somewhat bizarre extreme. I'm not sure what if any significance this particular confluence of sound-elements might be intended to have, but it has a rhythmical and verbal agility that gives it a much more individual character than Cercles et surfaces. The third piece La radio, ça détend (2001) is described as a ‘petit divertimento radiophonique’ and consists of a headlong collage of found voices and musics, while Marelle ou Les instants de la vie (2017) returns the listener to the more elusive and abstract textures of Cercles et surfaces. The theme of dismembered tango music resurfaces even more emphatically as the main focus of Purzelbäume (2003), while Tapages nocturnes (2015) treats recorder sounds in a not dissimilar way to the voices in L, emphasising the instrument's intimately voice-like personality. It's difficult to get a sense of stylistic continuity through the disc, in distinction to the others under review, and each piece is more or less reminiscent of something else, albeit composed with a sharp sense of timing and sound-design, and a tendency often to focus on a single delicate strand of sound rather than always weaving them together into something more complex. This last-named quality is at its most attractive in Cercles and Marelles, and the final piece Yegl (2007), whose computer alert sounds are amusingly arresting but will surely lose their significance in a few more operating-system updates’ time.

Finally, Annie Mahtani (b. 1981, Coventry) is concerned in her liner notes to cite the sources of her recorded materials, and the circumstances under which the pieces were conceived and realised, in a way that contrasts markedly with the more poetic and suggestive texts accompanying the other CDs, which might suggest a somewhat documentary approach to composition, although the music is mostly at least as abstract in its effect as anything on the other five CDs. Of course, the resources of computer music enable almost any sound to be turned into almost any other sound, and there is often little to distinguish the ‘concrète’ from the synthetic, so that it might be questioned whether mentioning source materials has any real purpose in giving listeners a point of entry into the music. The effect might indeed be quite the opposite – a sense of confusion when what's heard seems to have little or no connection to its ingredients as described. Past Links (2008) subsumes a range of recordings made at a museum in the West Midlands into a continuous textural flow which indeed generates a ‘rich sonic landscape’, although reminiscent of a ‘bygone age’ it is certainly not, to these ears anyway. ’Round Midnight (2018) similarly treats recordings made in the Amazon rainforest with such a weight of transformative procedures that I found myself wanting only to hear the biological polyphony of the creatures whose calls had become so homogenised, and wondering why the composer felt she needed to add anything to them. The other pieces build up a picture of a musical style forged mainly from slowly changing laminar elements occupying a large proportion of the audible frequency range, and with a certain sameness of pacing (the shortest of the five pieces is 9′26″ in duration and the longest 12′57″) and overreliance on crossfading to bring about a sense of structural process. I had the impression of the field recordings on which most of the music is based being poured into the same textural and structural mixing bowl each time. The final Racines tordues (2019) is the only piece whose sources aren't mentioned, although music-boxes obviously play an important role, and I found it the most satisfying of the five, especially in that its mostly abstract-sounding constituent layers merge, separate and recombine in a much more subtle way than elsewhere.

In conclusion, the weight of the acousmatic tradition, as initiated in Paris by what became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, is felt to some extent in almost all of this music. There's no intransigent staking out of radically new musical terrain, such as one might associate with the tangential departures from the tradition in the work of composers like Xenakis or Radigue, but on the other hand there is plenty of evidence of the vitality and musical diversity of the medium, in the music of Monique Jean a significant (if belated) personal discovery, and in the almost diametrically different work of Ana dall'Ara-Majek a rare and captivating sonic exuberance that disarms criticism.