On Comme Bon Lui Semble, Sophie Dupuis crafts eerie atmospheres with a dreamy haze. The New Brunswick-based composer and violinist is an expert at writing diaphanous melodies using ghostly extended techniques. With this album, which takes its inspiration from visual art, she showcases her musical range, surveying everything from the faintest, most mysterious sounds to richly woven tapestries. Much of the album explores the different textures she can make with her instrumentation. The title track, written for orchestra, grows from distant, chromatic slurs into a swarming cacophony, calling to mind the music of composers like Einojuhani Rautavaara. With her string quartet, which appears later on, she takes a colourful approach to composing that calls to mind the French Impressionism of Claude Debussy. Perhaps most compelling, though, are the short interludes that weave between each of the quartet’s longer movements. In these thirty- to sixty-second-long passages, Dupuis dives even deeper; she might write for the grittier side of the violin, having it scratch and scrape, or let the strings get so quiet they almost disappear. Comme Bon Lui Semble shows us that Dupuis is always experimenting, unearthing all the unexpected sounds she can find.
