Evening 3 –
8 p.m.

Jen Reimer (ca)

Jen Reimer is an artist and musician who explores resonant architectural spaces and the embodied experience of sound through site-specific composition, performance, installation, and spatial recording. Her collaborative projects have been presented at Lisboa Soa, Tsonami Arte Sonoro, Tokyo Arts & Space, Sonic Topologies and Société de musique contemporaine du Québec. She often collaborates with Max Stein and shares a singing practice, Tunnel, with Maggie Tiesenhausen.

Program
Song of Air (2026) 25’
Song of Air documents a live, site-specific performance in the Humboldt Water Tower in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Over three years, Jen Reimer recorded the tower's sounds and developed a custom digital instrument shaped by its architecture, highlighting its resonant interactions with the wind.

Repeated encounters with the tower and its physical and acoustic responses guided the composition of Song of Air, which unfolded through cycles of recording; layering; and playing the instrument back into the space. During the performance, loudspeakers and tactile transducers pushed vibrations through the tower's steel and wood surfaces, activating it as a large-scale musical instrument.

Structured in four movements, the work explores the water tower as both instrument and composition, revealing the resonances of its material structure and the air within.

Alexis Blais (ca)

Alexis Blais (born in 1998, he/him) is a sound artist based in Montreal. Raw and corrosive, his acousmatic and mixed works explore concrete sound materials through a sculptural approach, set against a backdrop of modal harmonies. A graduate of the Université de Montréal in sound creation, his research focuses on exploring creative dynamics and fluid hierarchies in electroacoustic collaboration.

Alexis also works in theatre and dance. His piece Skand (2021) was awarded First Prize in the 2024 Destellos Competition (Argentina). His works have been performed in Japan, England, Europe, South America, and Canada.

Program 
Constellation (2025) 20’
Constellation originated as a sound design created for a choreography by Annie Gagnon. In the work, the performers enact a series of incantations centred around the zodiac, unfolding through six meditative tableaux. Their rituals give rise to dynamic systems in which each performer responds to the prayers and acts of care of the others. I therefore conceived the sound as a vast bed in which their invocations could unfold.

The music explores different relationships to cyclicality and the cumulative orchestration of heterogeneous sound materials, ranging from recordings of creaking metal to samples of instrumental music. The version presented at Akousma is a 20-minute excerpt from the original album, reworked as a multitrack version for the festival’s acousmonium.

Mouvements :
1. Sagitta
2. Libra
3. Apus
4. Pyxis
5. Antlia pneumatica
6. Cetus

.618 (ca)

.618 is the sonic alias of Nick Rony, whose emotionally charged compositions weave together field recordings, electronic textures, and organic instrumentation. His practice explores the concept of geotrauma and its imprint on collective memory, giving rise to immersive soundscapes that transcend genre boundaries.

Rooted in his Ayisyen heritage, .618’s work examines the persistence of history — the ways in which it permeates identity, experience, and perception. His art becomes a means of revisiting ancestral memory and exploring diasporic narratives through a deeply personal lens.

Guided by themes of territory, exile, and African symbolism, his sound work is intricate and evocative, treating sound design as a narrative medium in its own right. His performances are imbued with a spectral presence, connecting territory to trauma and memory to movement. Each performance becomes an emotional excavation and a spiritual ritual.

Program 
20’
Voices, percussion, breath, and fragments of Vodou ceremonies move through a constantly shifting electronic fabric. Through a custom-built sonic environment, .618 manipulates these traces as a form of living memory: they move, distort, and overlap, at times becoming unrecognizable.

Spatialization transforms the listening environment into a shifting space, where sounds seem to emerge from different depths, like presences circulating around the body. Somewhere between ritual and abstraction, the performance seeks less to tell a story than to make its traces felt — what remains, what returns, what eludes us.

Each performance thus becomes an unpredictable encounter between recorded material, improvised gesture, and space.

Audréanne Filion (ca)
Myriam Bleau (ca)

Audréanne Filion is a Montreal-based cellist and composer active in contemporary and experimental music. She has premiered works by Canadian composers including Sarah Davachi, Martin Arnold, and Simon Martin, and is a member of Quatuor Mémoire, No Hay Banda and Ensemble Éclat.

Her solo project for cello and electronics explores improvisation and the hybridization of ambient, noise, and contemporary styles.

She has performed at, among others, Gaudeamus Musiekweek (NL), Festival CHIII (BR), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE), M/NM, and Semaine du Neuf. Also active in experimental pop, she has collaborated with Everly Lux, Xela Edna, and Erika Angell. She trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal (Denis Brott, Elizabeth Dolin, Louis Dufort, Martin Bédard).

Myriam Bleau is a composer, digital artist and performer based in Montréal. Using music and sound as a point of departure, she creates audiovisual performances, acoustic and electronic music compositions, video works, installations and interfaces that articulate sound, light and movement.

Her work is mainly channeled through performance, embracing ephemeral and elusive contexts. From code and abstraction to physical computing and devices, she considers technology as another agency that co-creates the output. Her hybrid practice explores porous spaces between the physical and the virtual world, between the natural and the synthetic.

Her work has been recognized and presented internationally in festivals and events such as Prix Ars Electronica (AT), Sónar (ES, HK), Transmediale (DE), Rewire (NL), Sonic Arts Award (IT), Elektra (CA), Mutek (MX, CA, JP, AR), ISEA (CA, KR), ACT (KR), L.E.V (ES), Café Oto (UK).

Program
Live 20’
Audréanne Filion and Myriam Bleau present a study in the interaction between cello and electronics, in which acoustic and synthetic elements attempt to merge into a single responsive, ever-shifting organism.

Each section was conceived as a “sound object” to be observed in space, from different angles, rather than solely through time. Following a residency at EMS in Stockholm in July 2025, the two composers/performers explore feedback, parallelism, real-time spatialization, controlled signal degradation, overflowing distortion, and an oscillation between softness and noise.

Joël Lavoie (ca)

Joël Lavoie is a composer, sound artist, and sound engineer based in Montréal/Tiohtiá/Mooniyang, Canada. His compositional, performative, and installation-based practice explores the entanglements between humans and non-humans, the role of agency in listening practices, and the politics, aesthetics, and methodologies of acoustic ecology, with a particular interest in speculative soundscapes, temporality, sonic materiality, algorithmic manipulation, and immersive listening experiences. He is a member of the audiovisual trio mesocosm and has collaborated with numerous visual and performance artists.

In addition to composition and sound design, he works as a sound engineer, a practice that has allowed him to bring his sonic vision into the world of the performing arts. In 2023, he received a Félix Award (ADISQ) for Sound Design for Performance of the Year. His work has been presented at MUTEK, Elektra, Akousma (Canada), Pretxe, ACC, Dotolim (South Korea), C-Lab (Taiwan), V2_ Unstable, FIBER (Netherlands) Mans Sonore, Blockhaus (France), Videocittà (Italy), Currents (United States), Kontejner (Croatia), Forma, Sejf (Poland), and Fylkingen (Sweden), among others.



Programme 
Cet horizon qui se déplie (2026) 17’
By manipulating micro-loops and fragments of recordings captured during sonic drifts through various urban, natural, and oneiric environments, this piece explores the improbable permutations and perceptual entanglements in the spontaneous recomposition of a deep timescape; a horizon unfolding before us.

Exzald S (fr)

Exzald S est le projet de la productrice, compositrice et vocaliste Sarah Foulquiere. Éthérée mai indomptable, sa musique électronique explore les strates invisibles des mondes émotionnels et expérientiels, entre design sonore complexe, voix et abstraction onirique.

Sa discographie compren Iridesc, son album solo paru en 2025 sur Subtext Recordings, Labège, créé avec mu tate et NEXCYIA et sorti sur Good Morning Tapes, ainsi que plusieurs collaborations avec Aho Ssan et une contribution à More Life de Berlin Atonal.

À travers ses disques et ses performances, Exzald S façonne un langag sonore singulier autour de l’inconscient et de l’ineffable.

Programme 
Magnetics (2026) 19'51’’
« Dans ses rêves, voix, souvenirs et débris synthétiques s'attirent, se repoussent et s'entremêlent, traçant une cartographie nouvelle faite de passages, de seuils et d'horizons ».

Magnetics reconfigure des fragments de l’album Iridesc (2025, Subtext Recordings) et des matériaux inédits en une composition labyrinthique.

Ka Baird (us)

Ka Baird is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. Using extended voice and microphone techniques along with electronics, feedback, field recordings, and traditional instrumentation, they explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. Ka has collaborated with many other artists, both in structured compositions and through their dedicated practice of improvisation.

Their solo releases include "Sapropelic Pycnic" (Drag City 2017), "Respires" (RVNG Intl 2019), "Brooding Exercises" (Longform Editions 2021), and "Vivification Exercises" (RVNG Intl 2021). In March 2024, they released their most recent solo record entitled "Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos" through Brooklyn imprint RVNG Intl. Recent national and international engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), TUSK Festival (Newcastle, UK), Incubate (Tilburg, NL), KRAAK (Brussels, BE), Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL), and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude (Copenhagen, DK). They have been artist-in-residence at We Jazz Festival (Helsinki, FI), Sonoscopia (Porto, PT), Inkonst (Malmo, SE), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). They have been a recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art's Emergency Grant, a Jerome Foundation Artist-In-Residence at Roulette Intermedium, and was a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow through 2023-25.

They are one of the core members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, founded in Chicago in 2001.

Program
A thousand miles of hungry static 20’
Ka Baird presents "A thousand miles of hungry static", a performance piece that explores the spectral forces of reality through various sonic encounters and physical movement.

The piece features extended voice and microphone techniques, live-processed flutes, samples, feedback, fractured rhythms, and interfaces that both trigger and manipulate sound. The performance embodies Ka’s signature tone that is simultaneously confrontational, mysterious, visceral, and humorous.