Day 1 - 
8pm

2024 JTTP composition contest

The Canadian Electroacoustic Community’s Jeu de temps /Times Play competition highlights new electroacoustic works produced by young or emerging composers and sound artists from or living in Canada.

Mikael Meunier-Bisson (ca)

Mikael Meunier-Bisson is a Montréal-based experimental and electroacoustic music composer. Around 2020, his compositional focus shifted to explore the realms of ambient and textural music. This self-taught practice quickly became more intricate in recent years as he flirted with acousmatic techniques. His current work aims to transcend the “locality” of ambient music by engaging with the “global,” to explore tonality in an abstract way, and ultimately reach emotional resonance through combinations of methods that may still be unfamiliar to us. Since 2023, he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Musiques Numériques at Université de Montréal. His work ‘musicfriend’ was composed under the teaching of Martin Bédard in the winter of 2024.

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Program

musicfriend (2024) 8’00”

Arising as the outcome of frank encounters between several frames, musicfriend is the culmination of many reorganizations. Infused with a suggestive and strongly accentuated materiality, the rhetoric of this project is strewn with doubts, trials and errors, in a continual vacillation between the referential, the dreamlike and the playful.

Credit : Aidan Potter

Vivian Li (cn/ca)

Vivian Li is a Tiohtià:ke /Montreal based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sound and music. Driven by a fascination with the therapeutic and time binding properties of sound, her music combines hypnotic melodies, soothing synth ambiences, autobiographical field-recordings and soft noises to explore moments of introspection and intimacy.

She has performed and presented work at venues and festivals nationally and internationally, such as MUTEK (Montreal), Pique (Ottawa), Sound Art Lab (Struer), Inkonst (Malmö), Eastern Bloc (Montreal), perte de signal (Montreal), Kwia (Berlin), Fondation Phi x Nuit Blanche (Montreal), Hectolitre (Brussels) and Karachi Biennale .

Since 2021, Vivian hosts a monthly radio show - Lo Signal - on Montreal's community radio station CKUT 90.3fm. This two-hour slot serves as a sonic playground where she shares her ambient scraps, field recordings, drones, experimental edits, and audio diary.

Linktree | ︎


Program 

Memory Playback (2024) 12’00”

This piece explores the potential of sound to preserve and resurrect memories. Profoundly autobiographical, most recordings originate from the composer’s personal journey. Within this auditory landscape, fragments of intimacy and souvenirs resurface, in a distorted, almost distant manner, teetering on the brink of utter disintegration. As these bits and pieces of the past overlap on each other, they create new imageries and feelings, transcending to “hyper memories” (Maria Chávez, 2020).

Prizewinner of the Concours de Composition Acousmatique petites formes 2024.

Credit : Aidan McMahon

Byron Westbrook (us)

First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene over the last decade and a half and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook has woven intricate tapestries of sonority that bridge the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. Westbrook creates sculptural and immersive compositions, with highly acclaimed full-lengths on imprints like Root Strata, Hands In The Dark, Umor Rex, and Ash International, and presentations at the Walker Art Center, ICA London, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, MaerzMusik and Rewire Festivals among others. His newest release Translucents was published by Shelter Press in 2024.

Website | ︎ | ︎ | ︎


Program 

Translucents (Remix) (2024) 20’00’’

Inspired by the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of "audio after-image". The work presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener's mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. It is a play with memory, with presence, and with time. It experiments with a dynamic between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place. Translucents is presented here in a "Remix" form that differs from its published release, exclusively for Akousma.

Credit : Élise Durant