Christian Bouchard

Christian Bouchard began with electric guitar, then switched to classical, then back to electric, then prepared electric… then he stopped playing guitar altogether and started electroacoustics. He attended the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal where his studies, although primarily focused on electroacoustic music, also included music for theatre and film, installation, live performance with the Theresa Transistor quartet, and electronic music. He has won awards for composition in national and international competitions, the most recent being the Joseph S. Stauffer prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. He also works as a sound recordist for film and TV.

Discography


Program 

Birdscape(2021-22) 14’ – premiere

Subject: birdsong.

Sound flowers of the earth, first terrestrial melodies, oscillators with complex modulations. Transposed, exploded, hatched, permuted into new species. Survival... All the same, a trace of their flight path put into space: figures of eight of the swallow, varied and jerky curves of the bat, stationary flights and hyper-fast movements of the bird- fly, vertical lines of the bird of prey, the hovering of the cuckoo, clusters, sailboats, etc...

Around an electronic nest. Bad weather, hunting, intimate games, diurnal calm, nocturnal threat, humans and their machines, the silent ornithologist. Here is the winged biped orchestra.

Made with the help of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans

Cinema foley artist Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans’s passion for sound and listening pushed her to discover acousmatic music in 1984, at the 1st edition of the Festival acousmatique international L’Espace du son in Brussels (Belgium).

After graduating in film editing from a cinema school (Institut supérieur des arts [INSAS]), she earned, under Annette Vande Gorne’s direction, a First Prize (1990) from the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles and a graduate diploma in acousmatic composition (1993) from the Conservatoire royal de Mons.

Her works are a reflection of her interest in imaginary worlds, like the worlds transmitted by the radio, which she listens to daily, and she relays those worlds as imagined landscapes where iconic and transformed sounds act as land features orienting listeners’ mental representations. They also convey her ability — honed in her career as a foley artist — to make non-instrumental sounds speak, to make them expressive, to manipulate sound bodies with precision and a keen attention to the tiniest eloquent variations they can offer. Landscape recordings and play-sequences have become the cornerstones of her works.

Program

l'Odeur du soufre / The Smell of Sulhur (2020) 10’11"

Something in the air smells like sulphur, our senses are alert.
The piece is in quadriphony (and stereo reduction) to immerse ourselves in the sensations that surrounds us.
“This world is a system of invisible things, visibly manifested”

"Dangerous actions are, in their natures, poisons which at the first are scarce found to distaste, but… burn like the mines of Sulphur… as soon as violence intervenes.

A slightly modified quotation – the word "actions" instead of "ideas". In today's history, bad faith has had many harmful effects on Life.

This music was made in the hope of conjuring a spell that came from a premonition.

Produced at the Studio Métamorphoses d'Orphée with the help of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, music department.

Martin Bédard

My current work focuses mainly on deepening and exploring the discursive possibilities of digital audio music. In a time where sound creation is marked by a fascination with new media, research on the notions of discourse seems to me essential. My “sound architectures” question the grammar of sonic organization and the elements constituting the possible discourse of the audible. They seek to further explore new rhetoric through conceptual media interdisciplinarities between audiovisuals (cinema), literature (Nouveau roman, Oulipo, rhetorics), art (visual arts, architecture), and science (including natural models among other things). To this end, in 2012 I submitted a doctoral thesis — Du langage cinématographique à la musique acousmatique: écritures et structures (From cinematic language to acousmatic music: writing and structures) — on the possible relationships between cinematic grammar and digital audio music.

Program 

Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1) (2021) 17’27" – premiere

To MH and Lili…

The very nature of honey is for me an inspiring natural model, in life and particularly in the realization of this work. Honey is the result of a long transformation. Instead of being secreted spontaneously, it is the result of a long process of metamorphosis which begins with quasi-volatile materials (pollen, nectar) thus evolving in a process of continuous densification to achieve a rich, dense texture, and this, until crystallization. The bee collects, unifies, transfigures and transfuses: it allows the passage from pollen to honey, that is to say, it makes a powder, a dispersion without order, a structured and unified liquid. The symbolism of honey is associated with transformation and synthesis. Honey also represents a time of harvest and abundance.

Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1) proposes a sound architecture having as background:

· the transformation and metamorphosis of materials towards densification and transfiguration;

material richness and abundance associated with a harvest period;

· the depth of the retrospection and its temporal and musical possibilities which recapitulate the journey made up to the period of harvest; and

· poetry related to invisible transformations, to recognition, to the greater than oneself.

I also have, in relation to these themes explored in Honey (Architectures From Silence No. 1), a particular sound concern for the architectural and formal evolution of the work thanks to a more structural approach to editing, placing particular emphasis on a certain non-linearity and fragmentation between the large units and their sub-units of the work while seeking local cohesion (gestures, phrasing, techniques and processes of links, principle of cause and effect) and holistic (the work in its entirety). The work takes a polyphonic path with constantly interrupted lines where discursiveness is animated by the notions of parentheses, parentheses within parentheses, ruptures and mise en abyme, which suggests a somewhat disconcerting rhizomatic departure mainly in the first part of the work. On the other hand, over the enunciations, an exponential development emerges by pushing to term the speech specific to each of the voices which were presented during these multiple previous appearances.

Thanks to the Conseil des Arts de Longueuil.

Martina Lussi

Martina Lussi (1987*) creates musical compositions, presents installations and performs live in various contexts. Her artistic practice is based around the act of listening. Her compositions incorporate field recording, synthesized sounds and voice. Through a variety of sonic material she creates broad soundscapes. Her latest Album „Balance“ was released digitally on September 3, 2021 and on vinyl in May 2022 by Präsens Editionen. She holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Arts Practice and lives and works in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Website

Program 

Akousma Mashup (2022) 17’30" – premiere

Martina Lussi will present a unique mix for the public of Akousma : excerpts from her album « Balance » (Präsens Editionen , 2021) will meet field recordings (Birdsongs) and installation piece (The Listener). A mashup that fits her artistic practice quite well.

Nicolas Bernier

Nicolas Bernier’s sound work and research centre around questioning the performativity of electronic sound, drawing on the dialogue between visual arts, dance, literature, photography, moving image, design, and theatre. In the midst of this eclecticism, his artistic concerns remain constant: the balance between the cerebral and the sensual, and between organic sources and digital processing.

His work was recognized with a Golden Nica award at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013, one of the most prestigious accolades in digital arts. His creations have also garnered the interest of major international events such as SONAR (Spain), MUTEK (Canada), DotMov Festival (Japan), ZKM (Germany), and Transmediale (Germany) and his sound pieces can be found on record labels including LINE (US) and leerraum (Switzerland).

He holds a Ph.D. in sonic arts from the University of Huddersfield (UK) and teaches in the Digital Music program at the Université de Montréal. He is a member of the Perte de signal, CIRMMT, and Hexagram media arts research centres.

Program

Aluminum (2022) 9’30" – premiere

Sound artist Mo H. Zareei created an instrument called Material Sequencer: an 8-step electromechanical sequencer in which a solenoid hits a block of physical matter to generate different rhythmic patterns. Zareei invited some artists to compose a new work with the device, my block of material being aluminum.

I used the sequencer to trigger control signals from a Moog Mother-32 synthesizer coupled to effect pedals. Although the final result is a piece fixed on a support, the piece is essentially interpreted live by the superposition of 3 improvisations. Behind the synthetic pads hides the acoustic sound of the percussion generated by the sequencer, underlining its importance in triggering events.

The structure is composed of two antagonistic parts: an energetic first movement with short attack parameters and a second movement with ample envelopes.

Lea Bertucci

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates spatialized speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and spatially aware projects that initiate new access points to architecture. Her approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience.Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with Ben Vida.   

Program 

You and I Are Earth, the Waves Crash Within Us (2022) 20’

For flute, voice and electronics. Commissioned by the GRM Institute and premiered during the 17th edition of the Présences électroniquefestival on April 17, 2022, in Paris.

Alain Thibault

Alain Thibault's music has been presented locally and internationally in many contexts, including contemporary music and digital art events in North America, Europe and Asia. As a curator and artistic director in the fields of contemporary digital art, electronic music and sound art, Alain Thibault is also the founder of two major events in Montreal: ELEKTRA, an activity presenting digital art performances since 1999, and BIAN, the International Digital Art Biennial, oriented towards exhibitions, installations and public art since 2012.

Program 

Cinq Nôs ultramodernes (2022) 15’ – Pilot

It was while rereading Yukio Mishima's Five Modern Noh that I came up with the idea of creating these Five Ultra-Modern Noh. Space exploration was then considered as "ultramodern", associating in particular the characteristic slowness of the narrative deployment of Japanese Noh theater to the movements of astronauts in space. This first piece, a pilot of sorts, takes as its starting point the arrival on the moon of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission. The composition is characterized by the use of these beeps, announcing and closing the communications of the command center in Houston. These Quindar Tones, lasting 250 milliseconds, had respective frequencies of 2525 Hz when the button was pressed in intro and 2475 Hz when it was released, thus indicating the end of the transmission. Using excerpts from the transcripts of this first mission to the moon, spoken by synthesized voices, the overall result is both narrative and abstract, with a somewhat supernatural quality, another characteristic of Noh.

Pauline Patie

Pauline Patie is a French composer of electroacoustic music. Based in Montreal, she is studying for a master's degree in composition at the Department of Digital Music of the Université de Montréal. Her work has been awarded the Marcelle-Deschênes 2021 prize (Université de Montréal), and has received honorable mentions at the international electroacoustic music competitions MusicaNova (Prague) and Destellos Foundation (Argentina). Interested in the trance effect, her work explores the combination of discomfort and appeasement for the listener. She thus questions the mysterious reactivity of the body to immersion and its causality.

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Program

One Hundred Senses [A/V] (2022) 15’ – premiere

Since childhood we have been influenced by visual and sound codes that today contribute to our way of perceiving the world. In this performance I therefore sought to explore my subjectivity in the elaboration of an expressive discourse of abstract forms and sounds.

JTTP 2022

First prize winners at the 23ⁿᵈ edition of the Jeu de temps / Times Play contest of the Canadian electroacoustic community (CEC)

JTTP - Latin America

Elliot Yair Hernández López

Born June 3, 1999 in Mexico City.
He studied sound art with Manuel Rocha Iturbide, electroacoustic composition with Edmar Soria and electronic art with Hugo Solis. He has presented his audiovisual works and electroacoustic pieces in different countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, Portugal, Switzerland and Europe. 'Austria. He recently won the international competition “Young Lion*ess of Acousmatic Music” and won first place in the JTTP Latin America award. As a digital artist, he seeks to experiment with different objects and different disciplines to create immersive pieces. , reflexive and abstract in order to offer the public sensations and emotions through audiovisual elements.

Programme

Ritual (2021) 5’25’’
"Ritual" is a sonic exploration that combines digitally transformed everyday sounds; the play tells the story of a being trapped in an eternal dream that repeats endlessly, each repetition being a deeper and deeper dream stage.

•     Close your eyes, inhale and exhale, repeat three times. am I listening?
  
• Move, feel the sound.What's going on?A dream, a dream come true.
  Do you hear the voices?
  
• I feel like I'm trapped , it's such an unreal feeling.
  
• What do you feel? Anxiety, as if everything was closing around me.
  
• Do you hear the bells?
  
• No, I don't hear anything, I only feel this body that holds me, in an eternal illusion.
  Listen carefully to the mantra...

JTTP - Canada

Joseph Sims

Joseph Sims is an emerging electroacoustic composer who focuses on multichannel composition and sound design for visual media. With roots in folk music, his compositional approach remains grounded in intuition and emphasizes the kinetic potential of sound organization. His education in visual arts has led to a keen interest in multidisciplinary projects. This is expressed through frequent collaboration with animators, film makers, and artists. He is currently completing his BFA in Electroacoustic Studies at Concordia University.

Katie Finn

Katie is an emerging illustrator and animator born in London, Ontario and currently living / working in Montreal, Quebec. Her work incorporates a mixture of analog and digital techniques, exploring new mediums in order to service the experiential and narrative possibilities of animation. She finished her BFA in Film Animation at Concordia University in 2022. Katie will continue to animate forever

Program

e (mi) [A/V] (2022) 7’11’’

A collaborative audio-visual composition created by Joseph Sims (sound) and Katie Finn (animation). The piece explores contemporary and historical aesthetics of visual-music, displaying a variety of gestural and textural sound-image relationships. The focus was to create even hierarchical status in both the visuals and sound. This was achieved by each artist influencing both mediums at various stages of the creation. The macro and mezzo structures were determined by a visual score, while gestural energy and textural aesthetics were realized through the sonic material.

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier is an artist and mechanical engineer, and he teaches at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques of the Université du Québec à Montréal. He holds an M.Sc., as well as a Ph.D. in acoustics. As part of his practice that brings together the arts, sciences, and technologies, he has produced more than 50 works in music, sound art, and digital art. Trained as a bass player, he has progressively shifted his music and sound practice further into the fields of electronics and computers. He is currently associate director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media, and Technology.

Website
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Program

An idea appears, it's scary, the metaphor moves (2022) 16'

Assembly. A chronological sum of improbable pairings of sounds and influences combining literature, magical realism, popular culture, ultra-pop music, noise inclinations, drone, electronics, acoustics, silences and rhythmic shimmers. Apparently arbitrary, it is a sum of nested quotes that builds this montage punctuated by piecemeal, fragmented improvisations. A magma of bare contrasts. Parts, movements and notes merge in a maze of electronics and modulars.

Vanessa Massera

Vanessa Massera has specialized in electroacoustic music, a medium she uses to express poetic ideas within the multiple cultural spaces and environments that fuel her inspiration.

Her works have been programmed by the following festivals, among others: EBU Euroradio Folk Festival (Russia), Svensk Musikvår (Sweden), NWEAMO (Japan), EMUFest (Italy), Música Viva (Portugal), NYCEMF (USA), Sound Travels (Canada), and Ai-maako (Chili). Her piece Éclats de feux won the 2nd prize at the Jeu de temps / Times Play (JTTP) competition (Canada, 2016).

She studied at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal (2008-12), and later received a PhD in 2019 from The University of Sheffield (UK) for her thesis Environment in Electroacoustic Music.

Program

Border Crossing (2018) 10’21"

Border Crossing was part of a LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) produced in the UK with the migrant crisis in Europe as a theme. This LARP was raising awareness about the challenges migrants face and the conditions in which these challenges arise. This work is the symbolic representation of blindly passing from one’s country of origin to the next one without knowing what the path looks like or how long it will take to get to your destination.

[From electrocd.com. English translation: François Couture]

Border Crossing was realized in 2017-18 at the EMS (Stockholm, Sweden) and was premiered on May 24, 2018 during the event The Quota at The Gaol in Oakham (Wales, UK). It was commissioned by the Avalon larp studio. Thanks to Martine Svanevik for this wonderful collaboration.

Antoine Lussier

Antoine Lussier has been passionate about the sound wave from an early age. He toured internationally for several years, performing with his group Ion Dissonance as a guitarist and composer, but also as a member of pop, rock, hip hop, blues and gypsy groups. Lussier is currently a sound engineer and producer, with activities that range from directing to teaching, as he seeks to broaden this musical adventure through acousmatic composition. He is also active in various sectors of music and image creation, notably sound design for short films and music and sound creation oriented for video games. A graduate of the bachelor's degree in digital music from the University of Montreal, he is pursuing his master's degree in research-creation in the same establishment. The core of his research is dedicated to expanding the capabilities of the instrument that has brought him to this point today: the studio.

Program 

Disjonction (2018) 10’30"

Different possibilities of temporal manipulations afforded by editing were explored during the composition of Disjonction. Using synthesis and sound recording, tiny singularities have spawned expansive constructions. Out of these luminous gestures and vast movements darkness appears. A mechanical and electrical aura feeds the piece from a material point of view, tracing a discursive course of uncertain temporality; an imaginary path of a timeline weakened by disorder.

Franck Vigroux

 Franck Vigroux works at the intersection of music, theatre, dance, and video. Never one to limit himself in terms of style, he was active on the experimental and improvised music scene before his musical development took him into electronic music. He has collaborated widely, including with Elliott Sharp, Mika Vainio, Reinhold Friedl, Kasper T. Toeplitz, Phill Niblock, and the Ensemble Ars Nova. Following on from his concept albums, experimental films, and collaborations with playwrights, sound poets, and choreographers, Vigroux began to focus more deeply on live audiovisual work and stage writing. From there, he gradually moved into music creation for multidisciplinary performances. His first productions with the Autres Cordes company appeared in 2010. He has released records with Raster Media, DAC Records, Radio France Signature, Leaf, Cosmo Rhythmatic, and Erototox.

Website

Program

Materials II (2018) 20’00"

Materials II is a continuation of my electroacoustic pieces Materials and Tension, this type of textures, moving masses, ruptures and stripping. Let's say that I have been turning and turning in all possible directions the same musical dramaturgy for more than a decade, and that once again I hope to draw a new "narrative" from it. It will be a live concert, with my usual hardware instruments, which will be based on a very specific structure and sound materials but with a degree of flexibility in my relationship to time, influenced by the acoustics of the room, that I don't know, the system that I don't know either, in short part of the shape of the piece itself has an unknown part… and that's good!

Myriam Boucher

Myriam Boucher is a video and sound artist based in Montreal (Canada). Her sensitive and polymorphic work concerns the intimate dialogue between music, sound and image, through visual music, audiovisual performance, Vjing and immersive projects. Fascinated by the natural environment, she creates audiovisual compositions from the landscape and the relationship that human maintains with it. Her work, « evocative in its dynamism, brings its audience close to something akin to feeling multiple emotions all at once » (The Link). Boucher’s compositions range from works for orchestra, ensemble, collaborative and solo A/V performances.

Program 

The Tuning of the Fields [A/V] (2022) 25’ - premiere

The Tuning of the Fields is an audiovisual performance seeking to evoke these moments of loneliness and wonder, and this sense of suspended time that inhabits us listening to the song of crickets, eyes closed, at night, lying in a field .

Thomas Ankersmit

Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and sound artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. He plays the Serge Modular synthesizer, both live and in the studio, and collaborates with artists like Phill Niblock and Valerio Tricoli. His music is released on the Shelter Press, PAN, and Touch labels, and combines intricate sonic detail and raw electric power, with a very physical and spatial experience of sound. Acoustic phenomena such as infrasound and otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play an important role in his work, as does a deliberate, creative misuse of the equipment.

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Program 

– Premiere (2022) 20’
 
For this concert he will perform new, loosely structured solo material that’s perhaps more cinematic and musique concrète than his earlier work - a project commissioned by Gaudeamus Foundation (Netherlands).

A music of scenes and sonic perspectives - created on the Serge Modular analogue synthesizer, without digital effects or other equipment. The music exists in the tension between abstraction and representation - with Ankersmit trying to 'breathe life' into the electricity, as it were.

Jessica Ekomane

Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.

Website
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Program

Manifolds (2022) 17’27" – canadian premiere

Manifolds was commissioned by INA grm and premiered in Paris on May 8, 2022, during the third edition of the Focus concerts series at Centquatre.