Day 1 - 
8pm
Bloc_1

2025 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.

Vivian Li (cn/ca)

A recent graduate of Université de Montréal, Vivian Li is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based sound artist and composer whose work explores the interplay between memory, presence, and the ephemeral nature of lived experience. Through field recordings, radiophonic techniques, and spatial composition, they construct immersive sonic environments that drift between documentary and poetry—where laughter, rain, and half-heard conversations become resonant archives of lived experience. She has performed and presented work at venues and festivals nationally and internationally, such as Karachi Biennale, Akousma (Montréal), MUTEK(Montréal), Pique (Ottawa), Sound Art Lab (Struer), Inkonst (Malmö), Eastern Bloc(Montréal), perte de signal (Montréal), Kwia (Berlin), and Fondation Phi x Nuit Blanche (Montréal).


Program

Sonic Memories of Fleeting Times | 流声逝忆 (2025) 15’00”

Sonic Memories of Fleeting Times | 流声逝忆 is a multiphonic, spatialized acousmatic piece that adopts a documentarist approach, exploring themes of intimacy, memory, and time through an aesthetic inspired by radio art. The work draws on autobiographical sound recordings — capturing moments at once mundane, intimate, and deeply personal — to create an immersive experience that transports the listener into another reality, another space-time.

*

A collection of lived experiences—
laughter, rain, eavesdropped conversations—
preciously fading, as they form.

To remember is to listen closely,
before they recede into the realm of memories.

~ ~ ~

“The curated recording is a hedge against mortality, the fragility of memory, and the ever-receding substance of history.” — Jonathan Sterne

Bruno Belardi (it)

Bruno Belardi is a musician and composer from Naples. He studies Classical Double Bass and explores Electronic Music under the guidance of Elio Martusciello at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples. His works have been presented at festivals such as Artescienza (Italy), Tempo Reale (Italy), Apnées – Paysages | Composés (France), Lisboa Incomum – Projecto DME(Portugal), Overdrive NYC (USA), and Ignite the Arts Festival (Canada). His acousmatic pieces have been recognized as finalists at MA/IN (2024), Musicacoustica Hangzhou (China, 2024), Soundcinema Düsseldorf (Germany, 2024), and Concurso Destellos (2024). Bruno has also been awarded at the Totem Electroacoustic Contest (2025) and Landscape (2024).

Program
Gaman  11’01”
Award-winning piece of the Akousma Prize at the 2025 Totem Electroacoustic Competition

Gaman is a Japanese concept that evokes resilience, perseverance, and the quiet strength required to endure adversity. This piece investigates not only the boundaries of such endurance, but also its fragility — suggesting that, in the tension between resistance and collapse, a form of beauty or inner force can emerge. From a compositional standpoint, the piece is built around strong dynamic contrasts: moments of suspension and stillness are interrupted by abrupt sonic outbursts. This alternation reflects the internal struggle between maintaining balance and being overwhelmed by external pressures. Spatialization plays a crucial role, helping to shape a listening space that mirrors the surrounding chaos — while also tracing the listener’s effort to remain grounded within it. The sound material comes entirely from the acoustic instruments of Productions Totem Contemporain (PTC)

We thank the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal for making the artist’s presence at the festival possible.

Philippe Macnab-Séguin (ca)

Philippe Macnab-Séguin is a composer of instrumental, fixed-media, and mixed music whose work combines, collides, and refracts diverse styles through the lens of new media technologies such as spatial audio, live electronics, video, and smart phone applications. His music reflects his eclectic musical background spanning metal, jazz, South Indian percussion, Barbershop, glitch and experimental pop production. He and producer Nicolas Gaumond form the prog-pop duo Greetings From The Hole, and Aural Sonology, a phenomenological method of musical analysis, plays a large role in his research.

He has received over 25 scholarships and awards for his work, including the Prix d’Europe, a BMI award, 2nd placein the Graham Sommer Competition for Young Composers, four SOCAN young composer awards, a JTTP award, and funding from the SSHRC and FRQSC. He received his D.Mus in composition from McGillUniversity under the supervision of Jean Lesage.

Program 
Gone for Eggs 23’34”

"Just as life gestates in the egg, so in ancient healing rituals would initiates withdraw into a dark cave or holeto “incubate” until a healing dream released them reborn into the upper world, in the same way the chickcrawls out of the egg.”-The Book of Symbols, The Archive For Research In Archetypal Symbolism

Every night, we experience a small taste of death when we lose consciousness in the depths of sleep. Every morning, we are born anew. Gone For Eggs takes this fundamental experience as a starting point to explore the oscillation between day and night, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death. The texts were written by Philippe Macnab-Séguin and Nicholas Papaxanthos; portions of the Book of Symbols reproduced with permission from The Archive For Research In Archetypal Symbolism.