Futur Antérieur

At AKOUSMA, we love presenting pioneering works from the repertoire, which notably led us, during our previous edition, to revisit the work of Daphne Oram (1925–2003).

This year, we delve into the music of Forbidden Planet, the science-fiction classic celebrating its 70th anniversary! Composed in 1956 by Bebe and Louis Barron, this music takes us back to a “Futur Antérieur,” a time when anything still seemed possible and the future felt as though it were just around the corner.

Bebe et Louis Barron

“Bebe Barron, an electronic music composer, was born in Minneapolis in 1925. While studying composition, she met pianist Louis Barron, who was more interested in electronics than performing. They married in 1947 and moved to Greenwich Village, where they began experimenting with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, manipulating recorded sounds through changes in speed, reversal, and tape splicing. Louis designed electronic circuits to generate sounds, while Bebe shaped and organized the resulting material. Part of New York’s avant-garde scene, they became associated with artists such as Anaïs Nin and John Cage, who encouraged their experiments in electronic music.

Their major breakthrough came with Forbidden Planet. Initially hired to provide electronic sound effects, the Barrons were eventually commissioned to create the entire soundtrack. Louis generated sounds using custom-built vacuum-tube circuits, often pushing them to the point of failure, while Bebe transformed and assembled the recordings through extensive tape manipulation.

Released in 1956, Forbidden Planet became a landmark of science-fiction cinema. Its extraordinary electronic soundtrack blurred the distinction between music and sound effects, creating an unprecedented sonic environment for a major Hollywood film.

Because of restrictions imposed by the Musicians’ Union, the Barrons could not be credited for a musical score and were instead credited with creating “electronic tonalities,” making them ineligible for an Academy Award nomination. Their groundbreaking work nevertheless remains a milestone in the history of electronic music and film sound.”

Excerpt from a text by science historian Dr. William B. Ashworth, available here.

Program
Forbidden Planets exerpts (1956) 15’

Felix Deufel (de)

Felix Deufel is a sound artist and sound ecologist whose work focuses on spatial sound, spatial hearing, and the relationship between soundscapes, society, and the environment.

Through field research and expeditions, he explores environmental issues related to ecosystems and human influence in the Anthropocene. His research investigates the soundscapes of environments including the Himalayas, tropical and subtropical rainforests, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Arctic underwater world.

His artistic practice encompasses spatial installations, compositions, performances, and field research, often through collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches combining music, dance, performance, and film.

Founder of Not a Number Studio, which specializes in 3D audio, Deufel also founded the Center for Immersive Media Art, Music and Technology (ZiMMT) in Leipzig in 2020, a space dedicated to the creation, experimentation, and presentation of immersive media art and spatial sound.

Program
LOST IN LIQUID NOISE (2023-2026) 20’
Chaque jour, le Groenland perd 600 millions de tonnes de glace. Une réalité difficilement perceptible — nous l’avons rendue audible.

Lost in Liquid Noise est une œuvre audio 3D multicanale entièrement composée à partir d’enregistrements de terrain réalisés par Felix Deufel au cours de deux expéditions dans l’Arctique (2023–2024) : vêlage des glaciers, eaux de fonte sous-glaciaires, tremblements de glace, systèmes de moulins glaciaires, captations sous-marines sous les mers gelées, icebergs à la dérive, présence de baleines et première floraison printanière du plancton.

Spatialisée sur un dispositif tridimensionnel de haut-parleurs, l’œuvre fait voyager l’auditeur à travers des textures sonores en constante évolution, allant de microdétails cristallins à d’impressionnantes ruptures glaciaires. Le bruit agit ici à la fois comme matière physique et comme métaphore : surcharge environnementale, transformation continue, perte de contrôle.

En l’absence de repères visuels, le son devient à lui seul le moteur narratif, brouillant les repères spatiaux et plongeant l’auditeur dans un état d’écoute profonde. Le changement climatique devient ainsi perceptible, non pas par l’explication, mais à travers une expérience spatiale, physique et sonore directe.

Christine Groult (fr)

Christine Groult’s work is rooted in the exploration of an expressive electroacoustic music, attentive to the poetic potential of sound and its evocative power. Her compositions often draw on the observation of physical phenomena, materials, movements, and transformations. Through images and metaphors, these experiences of the external world become models of thought that resonate with the most intimate dimensions of human experience — our emotions and the forces that move through us and set us in motion. Her compositional language emerges from this passage between the concrete and the symbolic, in a constant dialogue between sensory experience and thought. Her interest in places rich with imaginative potential has also led her to create site-specific works and sound environments. Her works are regularly performed in France and internationally.

Trained at Radio France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer, at the Conservatoire expérimental de Pantin, and in musicology and linguistics at the Sorbonne, Christine Groult was an assistant in IRCAM’s pedagogy department from 1976 to 1986. After directing the electroacoustic music studio at the Conservatoire de Chalon-sur-Saône from 1985 to 1990, she taught electroacoustic composition at the CRD de Pantin until 2015.

Program 
Eaux mêlées (2021) 30’
Commissioned and developed during a residency at Logelloù, a centre for exploration and creation in Côtes-d’Armor, Brittany. Premiered in September 2021 at the remarkable site of Le Yaudet, on the banks of the Léguer estuary.

The intimate union of land and sea characterizes the landscape of the Côtes-d’Armor (Brittany). It is impossible to clearly distinguish the boundary between land and sea, between solid and fluid elements. Rocks, sea, river, foreshore, salt marshes… all intertwine, while the sea reaches inland through the estuaries.

A meditative journey infused with the scent of the estuary and its mingling waters, of mud and primordial matter.

Featuring nature recordings by Marc Namblard (audio naturalist), as well as sounds recorded with Noëlle Deffontaines (dancer), Benjamin Dousteyssier (saxophone), and Lê Quan Ninh (percussion).

Roxanne Turcotte (ca)

A composer and sound designer, her musical aesthetic is rooted in a cinematic approach to integration that she calls cinemasonics. Roxanne Turcotte also creates and performs music for television, cinema, radio, the stage, the web, and circus arts, in addition to creating sound, music, and visual installations. She is frequently invited to serve on composition juries and conducts training sessions, lectures, and composition workshops. Roxanne Turcotte is currently working on the integration of sound installations and live performance with multichannel fixed media.

Originally trained as a pianist at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, she pursued graduate studies in electroacoustic composition under the guidance of Marcelle Deschênes et Francis Dhomont, and in 1988 became the first woman to earn a master’s degree in electroacoustic composition from the Université de Montréal. The music of Roxanne Turcotte has won numerous awards and distinctions (USA, France, Canada). In 2021 she received SOCAN’s Jan V Matejcek Award for New Classical Music. Her electroacoustic works have been programmed by several international festivals.

Roxanne Turcotte has been a member of the Artistic Committee (2016-2021) of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), is a member of the boards of directors of the CMC Québec (2016-), and of the Groupe Le Vivier (2021-)

Program 
Artéfacts (2024-2026) 13’45’’
Launch of the album Sillages on empreintes DIGITALes
https://electrocd.com/fr/album/6828-roxanne-turcotte-sillages

An introspective microcosm. Camouflaged sounds coming from everyday objects, greatly perennial living beings or miscellaneous recordings made on my travels (Seychelles, New Zealand) and in other favourite locations along my strolls.

Coleopterans, dipterans and hemipterans were here long before us and left indelible ecological footprints. I can hear a cicada sing very close to me, and it makes me think about past existence and locations. Cicadas appeared 264 million years ago. Their song was appreciated by the Ancient Greeks. Well hidden and sheltered underground, cicada larvae can wait up to 17 years before emerging, depending on the location, but they die very quickly once out. It says a lot about their longevity and past civilizations. The cicada’s song is produced by a vibrating membrane; it can reach 100 decibels. I am fascinated by them.

Memories, like cicadas, are similar to fossils. They represent lived experiences, social and political situations, man-made objects, and most of all circumstances and chance turning points. Will you be able to recognize a few witnesses of life on Earth in this work?
Various sections of this work have symbolic pauses between them illustrated by the voice of actor Laurent Poitrenaux. They act as structural breaths throughout the work, but also as witnesses to a culture and a vision of our vitality. Traces — some disquieting, other reassuring or comforting — show that we are alive even when we are dead. These quotes are taken from plays that remain unknown, despite constant archeological research, and have become artifacts.

There are also excerpts from interviews by host Michel Dupuis at CIBL in 1985, by Hélène Prévost at Radio-Canada in 1986 with composers Claude Lassonde and Michel Ratté, among others, and by Michel Rochon recorded by La conserve média in 2021.

Barry Truax (ca)

Barry Truax is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication, that deals with sound and technology, now in its 2nd edition.

In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France. Truax’s multi-channel soundscape compositions are frequently featured in concerts and festivals around the world.

In 2015-16 he was the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University in Berlin. As a teacher at SFU, he was given the University’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 1999, and an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2025. He was also appointed to the Order of Canada in 2025.

Programme
The Elemental Trilogy
Octophonic Works by Barry Truax

What The Waters Told Me (2022) 11’37’’
How The Winds Caressed Me (2023) 12’20’’
When The Earth Mourned For Me (2024) 12’20’’

This trilogy of recent pieces attempts to blur the distinction between natural and human sounds through hybridizing material from both sources, based on three of the primary elements – water, wind and earth. In the current ecological crisis, we may come to understand ourselves as an integral part of our environment that we need to respect.

What The Waters Told Me: If we listen carefully to flowing water in all of its varied forms, we may begin to hear voices and ascribe human emotions to them. The voices may be argumentative, even angry, as at the start of our journey, but suddenly they become hushed as we enter a large cavern. A mysterious voice seems to give us commands as we await the next stage, while ethereal voices guide us along. The commands become more insistent until the waters burst forth with transcendent song in a celebration of water and life.

How The Winds Caressed Me: The wind is a restless and devious presence in our lives, revealing itself as an invisible, tactile experience, and aurally only in what it is interacting with. It can pretend to speak to us with a voice when it passes through a narrow opening, or it can even resemble a musician when it activates a string – the Aeolian effect – or resonates a tube with its breath. And its moods can range from being a relentless, stormy foe, to the gentlest of caresses. This piece propels us through its repertoire, eventually enveloping us in an ocean of transcendence.

When The Earth Mourned For Me: With each passing day, we see evidence of our deteriorating environment and that evokes in us a personal and collective grief. We mourn for the earth, but if we listen to its cries, does it also mourn for us, the instigators of its demise? This piece invites us to listen to the voices of the earth that may emerge even from what we have extracted from it. The journey proceeds in four overlapping sections: Choir, Lament, Anguish, and Threnody.