Day 1 - 
9pm

Pierce Warnecke (us/fr)

Pierce Warnecke is a multidisciplinary digital artist at the intersection of experimental music, digital arts and video art. He has presented his work in the form of performances, concerts and installations at Rewire, GRM, ZKM, ManiFeste (IRCAM), Mutek, CTM, Elektra, KW Institut, Nemo, Sonic Acts, Martin Gropius Bau, MAC Montreal, Gray Area, LEV Festival, Semibreve, SXSW, etc.

Pierce collaborates often and has worked with Frank Bretschneider, Matthew Biederman, Myriam Bleau, Keith Fullerton Whitman and more. His music has been published on raster (DE), Room40 (AU) and Contour Editions (US). He is represented by Disk Agency in Berlin.

Website| ︎


Program 

Sonopeutic Smooth Sailing (2024) 21’34”

Sonopeutic Smooth Sailing, released on raster, is a meditation on semi-serious self-help through concrète dream/mare-scapes of chaotic and unpredictable sound experiments. For Akousma, a condensed multichannel reworking of the album is proposed here.

The music here is highly processed, with the intent of starting from simple well known electronic sounds (808/909 drums, simple modular synth and basic generative max patches), but performed, edited, cut-up and processed as much as possible to propose a music that would hopefully throw a wrench in any AI audio dataset that it might have the misfortune of falling into.

This album should be listened to as though it were part of a failed self-help program that could have allowed you, the listener, to train yourself on developing patience and attention through the power of extreme sound.

Ana Dall’Ara-Majek (fr/ca)

Ana Dall’Ara-Majek is a composer and sound artist living in Montreal. She is interested to the study of how instrumental, electroacoustic and computational-thinking approaches interact in music. Her favourite themes are micro-organisms and abstract-concrete landscapes. She’s been active for composing electroacoustic/mixte pieces and performing live electronic music. She performs regularly with Ensemble ILÉA and the duo blablaTrains as a Theremin player.

Her recordings have been released by Kohlenstoff Records and Empreintes DIGITALes, and her scores by Babel Scores and Editions Henri Lemoine.

Website | ︎


Program 

Mare Buchlae (2023) 11’53”

The opening piece in the 'Radiolaria' cycle takes us from the human world to the world of underwater organisms. The piece features all the sound families that represent the plankton-inhabiting species that will be explored individually later on in the cycle. My objective was to recreate an underwater world using only sound synthesis, moving from ocean field recordings to a waterscape consisting entirely of sounds from the Buchla 200 modular synthesizer.

Credit : André Parmentier

Estelle Schorpp (fr/ca)

Estelle Schorpp is a French-born and Montreal-based sound artist, composer and researcher active in the field of experimental music and sound ecology.
She uses the tools and methods of research-creation to set up projects that take a critical and creative look at our relationship with the sonic environment. Integrating concepts from disciplines such as sound ecology, sound studies, media theory, history of science, acoustics and psychoacoustics, her polymorphous approach combines performance, sound installation and algorithmic composition, as well as academic communication and the writing of articles.
Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes, characterized by their ambiguous shimmering sounds and the use of field recordings, seek both a physical and intellectual experience where listening is central.

Since 2022, she teaches at the Music Faculty of Université de Montréal (CA).

Website | ︎

Program 

A Conversation Between a Partially Educated Parrot and a Machine (2023) 20’00

Through the use of both original and digitalized birds recordings archives from the 1930’s, this performance explores the historical and sonic relationships between birds, humans and sound reproduction technologies.

In the late 19th century, Eldridge Johnson, head of Victor Records, said about the phonograph that it « sounded much like a partially educated parrot with a sore throat and a cold in the head” (Johnson, quoted in William Kenney’s Recorded Music in American Life). This is the same phonograph that Ludwig Koch used in 1889 to make the first recording of a bird in a zoo in Frankfurt. My aim was to unfold this comparison between an ill behaved bird and a sound reproduction technology to tell a story where music is made together by historical and recent audio technologies, birds, and the humans that listen to them.

In A conversation between a partially educated parrot and a machine, I take turns interacting with iPads and a gramophone equipped with sensors. On the one hand, this emblematic historical audio technology reads the original shellac disks by Ludwig Koch in the 1930’s, on the other hand it becomes a physical interface sending data to live algorithmic processes. The performance emphasizes on a dynamic back and forth between several kind of discourses (documentary, fictional, musical), technologies (computer and gramophone), and sounds (sounds of birds’ songs and sound reproduction artefacts).