(Constellation Records)

www.cstrecords.com/musiquefragile01/

Les Momies de Palerme/Brulez Ce Coeur (six stars)

Khôra/Silent Your Body Is Endless (seven stars)

Nick Kuepfer/Avestruz (five stars)

The first installment in a limited-release series, this trio of recordings from Les Momies de Palerme, Khôra and Nick Kuepfer offer distinct, though still compatible, takes on their umbrella title: Musique Fragile. Constellation Records - home to acts like Broken Social Scene spinoff Do Make Say Think, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra, Evangelista, and Tindersticks, among others - is the adventurous outfit behind the self-produced records from these local Montreal and regional off-the-radar Canadian artists. In their own ways, each record fulfills the label's dual definition of Hermetic music: "works that were conceived/executed in different forms of isolation (physical, artistic)," and which also invoke "Hermeticism in its more 'spiritual' connotation." Their fragility, though, is debatable, and their success in tapping those hermetic fonts of creativity varied.

Les Momies de Palermo's Brulez Ce Coeur ("burn this heart"), is the second disc from Marie Davidson and Xarah Dion, Quebec City escapees who channel their sense of displacement (and to a lesser extent, integration) into droning soundscapes and infernal hymns built from a core of keys, processed violin and voices. There are desolate winter swaths of repetition (the title track) punctuated with oscillating textures ("Le Cerf Invisible") and synth beats ("Incarnation") that suggest the necessity of turning inward; others highlight the duo's disembodied, reverb-drenched incantations ("Solis"), or build on sinister riffs ("Rivies") and the Middle Eastern-flavored fever-drones ("Médée") familiar to Les Momies from their participation in Sam Shalabi's Land Of Kush project (another Constellation artist). The longer tracks are glacially paced and just skirt becoming ponderous. But the mood is strangely devotional, more than solemn,  at least until the glistening "Je t'Aime" arrives at the end, its incantatory voices, drone and marching timpani heralding the return of sunlight, spiritual thaw and maybe even the hope of companionship and acceptance. But that track immediately makes you wish the duo would have sprinkled more of that - or, say, the warmth of a mid-winter fireplace - in the mix.

Brulez was recorded in a studio and featured guest slots; Khôra's Silent Your Body Is Endless and Kuepfer's Avestruz are instrumental records performed and recorded by a single person, and each sourced primarily from guitar, though in radically different ways. In five extended pieces, Khôra - Toronto resident Matthew Ramalo - blends acoustic and electric guitar figures with field recordings, processing the signals with digital interventions into chiming and droning soundscapes that leave listeners free-floating and immersed in worlds reminiscent of the deep sea, boundless desert, or deep space. They can be kinda lonely, in other words. The longest pieces here read as long voyages where time gets distorted, pulled apart and rearranged, the music traveling over monumental distances: the 14-minute slow-build-and-burn of "Natura Naturans," the 11 gothic, chimes-and-distorted-guitar minutes of "One Is the Other," or "The Desert and the Scream," where background beats leaven sinister night-sky drones like a Paul Bowles short story set in the Sahara. While those tracks put the "hermit" in hermetic, "Hushed Pulse of the Universe" reads like a Darwinian history of creation with a Taoist bent, single note  organisms oscillating and evolving into whirring, complex textures as a late-arriving percussion-pulse signals that all this goes on within us, too. It's a sublime moment on this collection's most intriguing set.

Where Khôra's pieces seem simultaneously expansive and cocoonish in their search for greater meaning, Nick Kuepfer's 15 short tracks on Avestruz -- which translates as "ostrich," though it can also imply "idiot" -- read like the sketches of an outsider artist intent on capturing  the nuance and idiosyncrasies of the places and people he observes. The pieces typically begin with acoustic guitar riffs that loop and layer, rinse and repeat, occasionally adding hand-percussion (pots, pans and kettles), bowed strings, and field recordings, many put to 4-track or mini-disc while Kuepfer travelled through Argentina in 2007-2008. In fact, the record reads like a slideshow of his voyage, some shots memorable, some funny, others forgettable. The music tilts Buenos Aires urban ("Red Sand Market," whose looped guitar figure recalls the Books), pampas gaucho ("Blue Pig"), and some sounds like rust-bucket buses navigating poorly paved roads ("Sapos de Tandil"). There's a palpable meandering spirit throughout, in other words. But while it may fit the nature of the journey and some of these sketches, the repetitive nature of some - "Vampryro" and "Tail Still Moves" being the most egregious examples - captures nothing so much as the monotony that travel can also consist of.

So, then - fragile music. Maybe something gets lost in the translation, or the umbrella term will make more sense with further releases under it. Because each of these records, to varying degrees of listener interest, seem more like solid statements by artists whose inner, hermetic worlds include creative voices strong enough to survive out there -- even if largely alone.

DOWNLOAD: Les Momies de Palerme, "Je t'Aime"; Khôra, "Hushed Pulse of the Universe"; Nick Kuepfer, "Blue Pig." JOHN SCHACHT