On Pond, soundsmith Tod Dockstader and feedback guitarist David Lee Myers churned up wildly creative abstract compositions from recordings of frogs. This time they work in the other direction, using abstract sounds and decontextualized sound quotes to put together a vivid feature film. The expression “cinema for the ear” has been used before in all kinds of contexts; in this case, it is unusually fitting. Bijou features some very precise sound environments that conjure up detailed mental images of wheres and whens. Snippets of voices stolen from movies or TV series introduce fugitive characters, while actions are instinctively deduced from recognizable sounds (a howling wolf, a flying helicopter, etc.). Yet, the listener who would solely focus on piecing a narrative back together from these elements would end up with a storyline as meaningless and patchwork-like as the few pages of screenplay found in the booklet. The listener is not meant to find a narrative or logic in the music, but to contribute his or her own narrative/logic. These short tracks (most of them are under four minutes in duration) stimulate the imagination, they move you from one setting to another, and they present you with pieces of an incomplete puzzle that has no box cover. Half meta-discourse on the “cinema for the ear” form, half inventive play on concrete/abstract signifiers from the moving picture paradigm, Bijou is, simply put, a very clever electro-acoustic work. And it deserves two thumbs up. – François Couture