Pierre-Luc Senécal (ca)

Master of Music (Université de Montréal, CA), Pierre-Luc Senécal built his artistic practice within the rich electroacoustic music field. Strongly inspired by rock, pop, and metal, he instills his electronic pieces with sensibility, lyricism and dashing passion. Listen to his music and you will discover dark depths and halos of luminous sounds. Hear the roar of its repertoire, complex and contrasted.

Amongst his notable achievements are the sound design for the famous Resident Evil 7: Biohazard video game and the founding of the dark, clamorous and attention-catching Growlers Choir. This unique vocal ensemble, exclusively made up of metal singers, was featured on America's Got Talent, one of the most famous TV shows in the world.

Program

Broken Voices (2023) 14’ - **premiere**

Broken Voices marks the first segment of a series exploring the theme of war. This haunting subject prompted extensive historicalresearch, which paradoxically heightened artistic inquiries. How does one depict in music the ravages of  war? How to employ sound to convey the brutality of an armed conflict? How to make specific war trauma resonate universally? How to compose about an unexperienced reality? Broken Voices stands as my endeavour to address these questions.

The piece fuses elements from prior works, sounds of metallic objects, vintage vinyl songs, and crucially, voice samples. Processed with saturation and feedback, the voices echo within themselves, metaphorically symbolizing anguished cries muffled by cascades of noise.

I'm grateful to Marc Béland, Émilie Sigouin, Vincent Pascal, and Rose Naggar-Tremblay for their voices. Additionally, I extend my appreciation to Jonathan Littell, who generously granted permission for the incorporation of excerpts from his novel "The Kindly Ones." I co-created this piece in partnership with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, who provided invaluable assistance as a music producer, and Bernard Gariépy-Strobl, who expertly fulfilled the role of mixing engineer.

Marja Ahti (fi)

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish composer and sound artist based in Turku, Finland. Ahti works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers and electronic feedback in order to find the space where these sounds start to communicate. She makes music that rides on waves of slowly warping harmonies and mutating textures – rough edged, yet precise compositions, rich in detail.

Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.

Website

PROGRAM

Still Lives (2020-2023), 21’

• Untitled
  
• Dust / Light
  
• In Ictu Oculi
  
• Exosphere
  

For her Akousma concert Marja Ahti will perform a set fusing new material with unique realizations of recent pieces. Ahti's performances are often a continuation of the compositional process, in which new pieces grow like branches out of pre-existing structures.

Devon Hansen (us)

Devon Hansen is a musician and writer based in Montreal.

Having produced electronic music since age 12 and sharpened their compositional skills through Concordia University’s Electroacoustic Studies program, Hansen’s work has taken a wide range of forms — from hip-hop, techno, and ambient music to compositions for podcasts, installations, and interactive media, as well as multichannel acousmatic pieces. Their music has been released by a number of labels in North America, Europe, and Japan, and they have performed in small independent spaces and at larger festivals alike.

Most recently, Hansen has developed an approach to improvised performance that focuses on the hybrid use of modular synthesis and laptop, wherein the laptop serves as a live looper and processor for a single sound source. No patch notes or structures are determined in advance, and little to no rehearsal takes place, a method inspired by Hansen’s experience as part of the improvisation trio Fousek/Hansen/Tellier-Craig.

Hansen is currently working on a series of releases for their digital label Idioms. You can also follow their work on Instagram.

PROGRAM

Untitled Improvisation 

"There is a state of mind that means being open to anything and trying to be extremely vulnerable to things. I try to know nothing, to be simple, curious, and open. And I try not to be clever. That’s the state of mind."— Laurie Anderson

Combining laptop and modular synthesizer, this improvisation makes use of a single synthesis voice to build layers via on-the-fly patching, live-looping, and processing. It begins from a basic initial patch and evolves through curious whims and impulsive decisions, leaning toward simplicity, restraint, and delicate detail.