Fractures doesn't consist of conventional music...unless, of course, you're in that poetic/stoned frame of mind in which rustling trees and murmuring highways constitute a symphony. But then, this is precisely what you're expecting if you're at all familiar with Empreintes DIGITALes.

Fractures' sixteen tracks of low-level ambient noise -- most of it recorded in public places throughout Canada and Europe -- form a cohesive and often lovely aural palette. The opening selection, "Angle Mort", sets out to explore the struggle of an injured patient amid the inhumanity of a hospital room. A trio of tracks titled "Trois miniatures en suite" experiment with the parameters of the electroacoustic sound, while setting the stage for a twelve-track epic collectively known as "Parcelles". Bouchard explains these final selections as illustrating: "the sound environment of a particular time, the chaos of the world, the rural calm, the urban swarms, the energy of the living" and finally, "fragments of moments". It's a vivid, fascinating explanation, and like the rest of the liner notes, it lends meaning to the album's audio/recording experiments. Unfortunately, the written descriptions are more effective than the tracks themselves at interpreting life's vivid, auditory moments. Without the philosophical thesis statement, recordings of traffic and crowds and industry sound like...well...random recordings. Although Fractures offers moments of brilliance, which will undoubtedly help to flesh out the electroacoustic artform, much of it is too abstract to be of lasting interest.