Christian Bouchard

Christian Bouchard began with electric guitar, then switched to classical, then back to electric, then prepared electric… then he stopped playing guitar altogether and started electroacoustics. He attended the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal where his studies, although primarily focused on electroacoustic music, also included music for theatre and film, installation, live performance with the Theresa Transistor quartet, and electronic music. He has won awards for composition in national and international competitions, the most recent being the Joseph S. Stauffer prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. He also works as a sound recordist for film and TV.

Discography


Program 

Birdscape(2021-22) 14’ – premiere

Subject: birdsong.

Sound flowers of the earth, first terrestrial melodies, oscillators with complex modulations. Transposed, exploded, hatched, permuted into new species. Survival... All the same, a trace of their flight path put into space: figures of eight of the swallow, varied and jerky curves of the bat, stationary flights and hyper-fast movements of the bird- fly, vertical lines of the bird of prey, the hovering of the cuckoo, clusters, sailboats, etc...

Around an electronic nest. Bad weather, hunting, intimate games, diurnal calm, nocturnal threat, humans and their machines, the silent ornithologist. Here is the winged biped orchestra.

Made with the help of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans

Cinema foley artist Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans’s passion for sound and listening pushed her to discover acousmatic music in 1984, at the 1st edition of the Festival acousmatique international L’Espace du son in Brussels (Belgium).

After graduating in film editing from a cinema school (Institut supérieur des arts [INSAS]), she earned, under Annette Vande Gorne’s direction, a First Prize (1990) from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles and a graduate diploma in acousmatic composition (1993) from the Conservatoire royal de Mons.

Her works are a reflection of her interest in imaginary worlds, like the worlds transmitted by the radio, which she listens to daily, and she relays those worlds as imagined landscapes where iconic and transformed sounds act as land features orienting listeners’ mental representations. They also convey her ability — honed in her career as a foley artist — to make non-instrumental sounds speak, to make them expressive, to manipulate sound bodies with precision and a keen attention to the tiniest eloquent variations they can offer. Landscape recordings and play-sequences have become the cornerstones of her works.

Program

l'Odeur du soufre / The Smell of Sulhur (2020) 10’11"

Something in the air smells like sulphur, our senses are alert.
The piece is in quadriphony (and stereo reduction) to immerse ourselves in the sensations that surrounds us.
“This world is a system of invisible things, visibly manifested”

"Dangerous actions are, in their natures, poisons which at the first are scarce found to distaste, but… burn like the mines of Sulphur… as soon as violence intervenes.

A slightly modified quotation – the word "actions" instead of "ideas". In today's history, bad faith has had many harmful effects on Life.

This music was made in the hope of conjuring a spell that came from a premonition.

Produced at the Studio Métamorphoses d'Orphée with the help of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, music department.

Martin Bédard

My current work focuses mainly on deepening and exploring the discursive possibilities of digital audio music. In a time where sound creation is marked by a fascination with new media, research on the notions of discourse seems to me essential. My “sound architectures” question the grammar of sonic organization and the elements constituting the possible discourse of the audible. They seek to further explore new rhetoric through conceptual media interdisciplinarities between audiovisuals (cinema), literature (Nouveau roman, Oulipo, rhetorics), art (visual arts, architecture), and science (including natural models among other things). To this end, in 2012 I submitted a doctoral thesis — Du langage cinématographique à la musique acousmatique: écritures et structures (From cinematic language to acousmatic music: writing and structures) — on the possible relationships between cinematic grammar and digital audio music.

Program 

Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1) (2021) 17’27" – premiere

To MH and Lili…

The very nature of honey is for me an inspiring natural model, in life and particularly in the realization of this work. Honey is the result of a long transformation. Instead of being secreted spontaneously, it is the result of a long process of metamorphosis which begins with quasi-volatile materials (pollen, nectar) thus evolving in a process of continuous densification to achieve a rich, dense texture, and this, until crystallization. The bee collects, unifies, transfigures and transfuses: it allows the passage from pollen to honey, that is to say, it makes a powder, a dispersion without order, a structured and unified liquid. The symbolism of honey is associated with transformation and synthesis. Honey also represents a time of harvest and abundance.

Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1) proposes a sound architecture having as background:

· the transformation and metamorphosis of materials towards densification and transfiguration;

material richness and abundance associated with a harvest period;

· the depth of the retrospection and its temporal and musical possibilities which recapitulate the journey made up to the period of harvest; and

· poetry related to invisible transformations, to recognition, to the greater than oneself.

I also have, in relation to these themes explored in Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1), a particular sound concern for the architectural and formal evolution of the work thanks to a more structural approach to editing, placing particular emphasis on a certain non-linearity and fragmentation between the large units and their sub-units of the work while seeking local cohesion (gestures, phrasing, techniques and processes of links, principle of cause and effect) and holistic (the work in its entirety). The work takes a polyphonic path with constantly interrupted lines where discursiveness is animated by the notions of parentheses, parentheses within parentheses, ruptures and mise en abyme, which suggests a somewhat disconcerting rhizomatic departure mainly in the first part of the work. On the other hand, over the enunciations, an exponential development emerges by pushing to term the speech specific to each of the voices which were presented during these multiple previous appearances.

Thanks to the Conseil des Arts de Longueuil.

Martina Lussi

Martina Lussi (1987*) creates musical compositions, presents installations and performs live in various contexts. Her artistic practice is based around the act of listening. Her compositions incorporate field recording, synthesized sounds and voice. Through a variety of sonic material she creates broad soundscapes. Her latest Album „Balance“ was released digitally on September 3, 2021 and on vinyl in May 2022 by Präsens Editionen. She holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Arts Practice and lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Website

Program 

Akousma Mashup (2022) 17’30" – premiere

Martina Lussi will present a unique mix for the public of Akousma : excerpts from her album « Balance » (Präsens Editionen , 2021) will meet field recordings (Birdsongs) and installation piece (The Listener). A mashup that fits her artistic practice quite well.

Nicolas Bernier

Nicolas Bernier’s sound work and research centre around questioning the performativity of electronic sound, drawing on the dialogue between visual arts, dance, literature, photography, moving image, design, and theatre. In the midst of this eclecticism, his artistic concerns remain constant: the balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sources and digital processing.

His work was recognized with a Golden Nica award at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013, one of the most prestigious accolades in digital arts. His creations have also garnered the interest of major international events such as SONAR (Spain), MUTEK (Canada), DotMov Festival (Japan), ZKM (Germany), and Transmediale (Germany) and his sound pieces can be found on record labels including LINE (US) and leerraum (Switzerland).

He holds a Ph.D. in sonic arts from the University of Huddersfield (UK) and teaches in the Digital Music program at the Université de Montréal. He is a member of the Perte de signal, CIRMMT, and Hexagram media arts research centres.

Program

Aluminum (2022) 9’30" – premiere

Sound artist Mo H. Zareei created an instrument called Material Sequencer: an 8-step electromechanical sequencer in which a solenoid hits a block of physical matter to generate different rhythmic patterns. Zareei invited some artists to compose a new work with the device, my block of material being aluminum.

I used the sequencer to trigger control signals from a Moog Mother-32 synthesizer coupled to effect pedals. Although the final result is a piece fixed on a support, the piece is essentially interpreted live by the superposition of 3 improvisations. Behind the synthetic pads hides the acoustic sound of the percussion generated by the sequencer, underlining its importance in triggering events.

The structure is composed of two antagonistic parts: an energetic first movement with short attack parameters and a second movement with ample envelopes.

Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates spatialized speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and spatially aware projects that initiate new access points to architecture. Her approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience.Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with Ben Vida.   

Program 

You and I Are Earth, the Waves Crash Within Us (2022) 20’

For flute, voice and electronics. Commissioned by the GRM Institute and premiered during the 17th edition of the Présences électroniquefestival on April 17, 2022, in Paris.

Alain Thibault

Alain Thibault's music has been presented locally and internationally in many contexts, including contemporary music and digital art events in North America, Europe and Asia. As a curator and artistic director in the fields of contemporary digital art, electronic music and sound art, Alain Thibault is also the founder of two major events in Montreal: ELEKTRA, an activity presenting digital art performances since 1999, and BIAN, the International Digital Art Biennial, oriented towards exhibitions, installations and public art since 2012.

Program 

Cinq Nôs ultramodernes (2022) 15’ – Pilot

It was while rereading Yukio Mishima's Five Modern Noh that I came up with the idea of creating these Five Ultra-Modern Noh. Space exploration was then considered as "ultramodern", associating in particular the characteristic slowness of the narrative deployment of Japanese Noh theater to the movements of astronauts in space. This first piece, a pilot of sorts, takes as its starting point the arrival on the moon of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission. The composition is characterized by the use of these beeps, announcing and closing the communications of the command center in Houston. These Quindar Tones, lasting 250 milliseconds, had respective frequencies of 2525 Hz when the button was pressed in intro and 2475 Hz when it was released, thus indicating the end of the transmission. Using excerpts from the transcripts of this first mission to the moon, spoken by synthesized voices, the overall result is both narrative and abstract, with a somewhat supernatural quality, another characteristic of Noh.

Pauline Patie

Pauline Patie is a French composer of electroacoustic music. Based in Montreal, she is studying for a master's degree in composition at the Department of Digital Music of the Université de Montréal. Her work has been awarded the Marcelle-Deschênes 2021 prize (Université de Montréal), and has received honorable mentions at the international electroacoustic music competitions MusicaNova (Prague) and Destellos Foundation (Argentina). Interested in the trance effect, her work explores the combination of discomfort and appeasement for the listener. She thus questions the mysterious reactivity of the body to immersion and its causality.

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Program

One Hundred Senses [A/V] (2022) 15’ – premiere

Since childhood we have been influenced by visual and sound codes that today contribute to our way of perceiving the world. In this performance I therefore sought to explore my subjectivity in the elaboration of an expressive discourse of abstract forms and sounds.