2024 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.

Mikael Meunier-Bisson (ca)

Mikael Meunier-Bisson is a Montréal-based experimental and electroacoustic music composer. Around 2020, his compositional focus shifted to explore the realms of ambient and textural music. This self-taught practice quickly became more intricate in recent years as he flirted with acousmatic techniques. His current work aims to transcend the “locality” of ambient music by engaging with the “global,” to explore tonality in an abstract way, and ultimately reach emotional resonance through combinations of methods that may still be unfamiliar to us. Since 2023, he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Musiques Numériques at Université de Montréal. His work ‘musicfriend’ was composed under the teaching of Martin Bédard in the winter of 2024.

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Program

musicfriend (2024) 8’00”

Arising as the outcome of frank encounters between several frames, musicfriend is the culmination of many reorganizations. Infused with a suggestive and strongly accentuated materiality, the rhetoric of this project is strewn with doubts, trials and errors, in a continual vacillation between the referential, the dreamlike and the playful.

Credit : Aidan Potter

Vivian Li (cn/ca)

Vivian Li is a Tiohtià:ke /Montreal based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sound and music. Driven by a fascination with the therapeutic and time binding properties of sound, her music combines hypnotic melodies, soothing synth ambiences, autobiographical field-recordings and soft noises to explore moments of introspection and intimacy.

She has performed and presented work at venues and festivals nationally and internationally, such as MUTEK (Montreal), Pique (Ottawa), Sound Art Lab (Struer), Inkonst (Malmö), Eastern Bloc (Montreal), perte de signal (Montreal), Kwia (Berlin), Fondation Phi x Nuit Blanche (Montreal), Hectolitre (Brussels) and Karachi Biennale .

Since 2021, Vivian hosts a monthly radio show - Lo Signal - on Montreal's community radio station CKUT 90.3fm. This two-hour slot serves as a sonic playground where she shares her ambient scraps, field recordings, drones, experimental edits, and audio diary.

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Program 

Memory Playback (2024) 7’00”

This piece explores the potential of sound to preserve and resurrect memories. Profoundly autobiographical, most recordings originate from the composer’s personal journey. Within this auditory landscape, fragments of intimacy and souvenirs resurface, in a distorted, almost distant manner, teetering on the brink of utter disintegration. As these bits and pieces of the past overlap on each other, they create new imageries and feelings, transcending to “hyper memories” (Maria Chávez, 2020).

Prizewinner of the Concours de Composition Acousmatique petites formes 2024.

Credit : Aidan McMahon

Byron Westbrook (us)

First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene over the last decade and a half and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook has woven intricate tapestries of sonority that bridge the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. Westbrook creates sculptural and immersive compositions, with highly acclaimed full-lengths on imprints like Root Strata, Hands In The Dark, Umor Rex, and Ash International, and presentations at the Walker Art Center, ICA London, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, MaerzMusik and Rewire Festivals among others. His newest release Translucents was published by Shelter Press in 2024.

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Program 

Translucents (Remix) (2024) 20’00’’

Inspired by the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of "audio after-image". The work presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener's mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. It is a play with memory, with presence, and with time. It experiments with a dynamic between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place. Translucents is presented here in a "Remix" form that differs from its published release, exclusively for Akousma.

Credit : Élise Durant

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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

Frédéric Janelle (ca)

Frédéric was born in Sherbrooke in 1981. He moved to the Montreal area in 1999 to study computer-assisted musical composition. He then began a career as a sound engineer and studied electroacoustic composition at the Montreal Conservatory of Music from 2006 to 2009. Frédéric draws his inspiration from technology and his visions of the future.


Program

L’Oracle (2024) 8’41”

The Visions of the Oracle.

Credit  : Frédéric Janelle

Monique Jean (ca)

Be it electroacoustic music, mixed music, sound installations or improvisations, the music of Monique Jean is engaging a present that happens now. She focuses on the tensions, fractures, and shocks of sound materials to transmute reality into poetry. She works on sound materials as if they were complex organisms animated by forces that keep them in constant evolution.

Since 2012, in search of a harsh, raw sound, she has been integrating analogue and no-input elements to her set-up as sources of instability and unpredictability. 

Her works have been selected by several competitions and performed and broadcast in several national and international concerts and festivals, including Multiphonies (Paris, France), Akousma (Montréal), Sonorities (Belfast, Northern Ireland), NYCEMF (New York, USA), The San Francisco Tape Music Festival (USA), Ai-maako (Santiago, Chile), and Elektra (Montréal). In 2012, she was invited for a residency at Fondation Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide (Italy).

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Program

Tumultes 15’ (2024)

Despite the barriers, walls, censorship and other verticalities that cut the horizon of everyday life, persist in remaining attentive by trying to find a way to you - here or elsewhere, near or far.

Inspired by the works of Adania Shibli (Un détail mineur) and Antoine Wauters (Mahmoud ou la montée des eaux).

Produced with the support of the Research and Exploration program of PRIM and the CAC.

Horacio Vaggione (ar/fr)

Horacio Vaggione (Argentina, 1943), has lived in Paris since 1978. Composition studies at the National University of Cordoba, then doctorate in musicology at the University of Paris VIII. Studied computer music at the University of Illinois (1966). Co-founder of the Center for Experimental Music at the University of Cordoba (1965-68), member of the electronic music group ALEA of Madrid (1969-73), he worked in France at IRCAM, at INA- GRM, at GMEB. Resident in Berlin (DAAD, 1987-1988). Between 1989 and 2012 he was full professor (composition and research) at the University of Paris VIII, where he is currently professor emeritus.

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Program *

Gymell I (2003) 9’20 followed by Gymell III (2024) 16’00

We can think of the active (corpuscular) principle of these Gymel by drawing inspiration from the words of Bachelard (1932): “The corpuscle has no more reality than the composition which makes it appear”.

And again: “Suffice it to say that the existence of the corpuscle has a root in all space.”

This explains not only the unreality of the corpuscle —if it is not inhabited by the composition— but also the reality of the space where it appears as continuity.
As for the works: Gymel I was produced in 2003 at the CICM studio, University of Paris VIII. It subsequently spawned several avatars, includingGymel III, created recently, in 2024, at the ICST (University of the Arts) of Zurich.

The two Gymel gathered here are Canadian premieres.

* For reasons beyond our control, the works will be spatialized by the composer and artistic director of the festival, Louis Dufort. The festival team wishes Mr. Vaggione a speedy recovery. 🫶

Florence-Delphine Roux (ca)

Florence-Delphine Roux is a digital and sound artist originally from Quebec City and based in Tiohtà:ke/Montreal. Her work explores the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a focus on the medium of radio. Her creations take the form of listening experiences, immersive sound installations, performances, video art, and radio works.

Driven by a sound-based practice, largely sourced from material stored from outdoor recordings, Florence-Delphine Roux's work is significantly based on the possibility of playing with textures that are not perceptible to the eye, particularly electromagnetic fields, thus contributing to a disruption of reality.

With a desire to develop a practice of fiction, the artist also invests in the field of radio production, with the ambition of creating a « cinema for the ear». 

Text by Frédéric Bonnet

Website | Linktree


Program

Cime (2024) 11’00

Cime proposes a disruptive ascent into the soundscape of one of Quebec's most mysterious peaks, Mont-Saint-Hilaire. Embedded in the collective imagination of the residents of Montérégie, this mountain has inspired numerous legends, with myths that endure, fueled by new beliefs related to the paranormal. The artist will navigate between capturing ambisonic soundscapes, natural very low-frequency radio signals, and analog and granular synthesis.

This work draws from phonographic archives created as part of a performative research project on extrasensory literacy and disruptive listening of the Gault Nature Reserve.

                           

Shane Turner (ca)

Shane Turner is a composer who is drawn to the mutable boundaries and properties of acousmatic music as a way of expressing experiences omitted by essentialism. Their music encompasses solo fixed works, audio for installations, popular forms in soundtracks, as well as group performances with live electronics and synthesis. Shane's works have been released on the Panospria Label under NoType, by the CEC, and performed at various festivals, including Mutek. They studied electroacoustic music composition at Concordia University.

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Program

rumors, approximated (2024) 10’00

rumors, approximated is an exploration of synthesis, vocals (Simone Pitot/Delorca) and a model combining the two.

Charting sensory discord: the constant dissolution and resynthesis of the senses experienced while moving between conflicting sensory regimes over the course of a particularly dynamic year. Complete information ecosystems, fed by private algorithms that reflected and molded their permissible sensoriums, ran headlong into collision while cultural schisms arose over the basis of old and nascent forms of expression.

Manja Ristić (hr)

Manja Ristić, born in Belgrade in 1979, is a violinist, sound artist, published poet, curator, and researcher. She graduated from the Belgrade Academy of Music (2001), then awarded at the Royal College of Music, London, with PGDip Solo/Ensemble Recitalist (2004). As a classical solo and chamber musician, as well as a composer and an improv musician She has performed all across Europe and in the US, involving collaborations with established conductors, performers, multimedia artists, poets, and theatre/film directors. Ristić’s sound-related research besides contemporary performance in the field of instrumental electro–acoustics, is focused on interdisciplinary approaches to sound and field recording as well as experimental radio arts.

The winner of several distinctive awards for solo and chamber classical music, laureate of the Academy Charles Cros Sélection Musiques Expérimentales 2024, holds an honorable mention from the Phonurgia Nova Awards, and a Golden Award for the extended media from the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia. She is a founding member of CENSE – Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies.

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Program

ghosts (2024) 20’

How do we approach the landscape of severe devastation and a dense history of warfare?

In the work ghosts I am using obsolete instruments – a modular synthesizer EMS Synthi 100, a discarded wheelchair wheel salvaged from the Adriatic Sea, and the piano fallen in disuse which belonged to the Austrian conceptualist, filmmaker, improviser, photographer, environmentalist, and writer – Karl Katzinger aka John Tylo (October 1953 – April 2021).

Next to these elements of the past and their voices rediscovered, I am incorporating live processing of hydrophone and field recordings, found objects, and electromagnetic fields, from several locations, appropriating them through the discourse of critical tourism and a culture of memory – more specifically through listening to the inherent memories of environmental devastation and warfare – in the South Adriatic, on the Atlantic coast, and the Czech-Austrian borderlands former Iron Curtain belt, including region of former Mauthausen–Gusen working camps.

Marie Anne (ca)

Marie Anne Bérard (she/her) is a Montreal-based composer and keyboardist. Her practice focuses on electroacoustic and audiovisual performances, sound installation and the use of sound journaling as a compositional method. She is also interested in the mediation of electroacoustic music. With financial support from the Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique(OICRM) and the Observatoire des médiations culturelles (OMEC), she is currently working on a master's degree in sound creation at the Université de Montréal.  Her performance Éphémérides (2021) was awarded the Martin-Gotfrit-Martin-Bartlett prize in the Jeu de temps/Times play (JTTP) competition.

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Programme

Solace (2023) 20’00”

Solace: a term signifying a source of comfort and calmness, the action of moving towards this state.

This live performance of ambient music attempts to find a path to solace, both for the musician and the audience. The person on stage wishes to show the countless sounds of her inner world by recreating personal soundscapes and melodies.

This piece was composed to be performed at a retirement home in Montreal, to introduce its residents to electroacoustic concert music.

Atte Elias Kantonen (fi)

A Helsinki-based sound designer and composer, Atte Elias Kantonen works in the fields of experimental music and performing arts.

Within his practice, Kantonen explores the potential of elastic synthesis and extremely processed sound as vessels for abstract, phantasmagorical storytelling. Building emotionally sonorous dioramas, he creates compositions where the serene and the discordant constantly fold in on each other. He has released on labels such as SODA GONG, kappa, SUPERPANG, among others.

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Program

a path with a name [a reimagined reprise] (2024) 18’00

a path with a name (a reimagined reprise) is a composition based on the sounding storylines from the album "a path with a name" (SODA GONG, 2023). The composition continues on the album's quest: drawing paths that zig-zags through digital herbage, synthetic pools of dew and clouds of sonic mist.

Ludwig Berger (de)

Ludwig Berger is a landscape sound artist, musician and curator. In his compositions, installations and performances, he enables sonic encounters with plants, animals, buildings and geological entities. He holds degrees in electroacoustic composition, as well as musicology, art history and literature. As a researcher and educator at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich, he studied the sonic dimension of alpine glaciers and water infrastructure. His work has been presented at GRM Paris, Ars Electronica and the Venice Biennale. He recently moved to Montreal after living in Zurich and Milan.

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Program

Garden of Ediacara (2024) 20’00

The musical eco-fiction Garden Ediacara unfolds a speculative ecosystem through synthesized vocals, physical modeling instruments and microscopic field recordings. Infused with storytelling techniques from sci-fi and fantasy, Ludwig Berger intertwines melodic songwriting with electroacoustic sound design. The project alludes to the geological period of Ediacara 600 million years ago —a peaceful underwater ecosystem inhabited by soft-bodied creatures without eyes and bones, which were completely wiped out through the appearance of a new species. Garden of Ediacara (released as album on -OUS) celebrates both the pleasures of biodiversity as well as mourning its inevitable loss.

Julien Racine (ca)

Montréal composer, sound engineer and producer Julien Racine, or simply Racine, has published five albums, the most recent of which, Boue, was released in March 2024 through Czech label Gin & Platonic. Quelque chose tombe, released on Danse noire back in 2020, was widely praised by international media, giving him the opportunity to tour Europe in the spring of 2020, then later that year at MUTEK Montréal. Throughout his career, Racine also composed music and soundscapes for several films shown in numerous cinemas, festivals and galleries. He is also one-half of duo Corporation alongside Keru Not Ever, with whom he hosts the radio show Scene on the HKCR platform; the duo also released Graffito on Czech label Genot Centre.

Website| Linktree


Program

Hamelin (2023-2024) 20’00

In the village of Hamelin, a mysterious flute player weaves through the unfortunate tumult of daily misery, wrought by the bubonic plague. His music rids the desperate village of its pests. However, the villagers, refusing to reward him, the flute player played again. This time, it was not the rats but all the village children who followed him out of the walls, disappearing forever.

In this futuristic-medieval piece, Racine creates an anachronistic sound world blending electroacoustic, noise, and film music. The piece began to take shape in 2023 and has been evolving ever since.

Olivier Alary (fr/ca)

Olivier Alary, born in France and based in Montreal, is a versatile composer known for his expansive repertoire spanning albums, film scores, dance music, and art installations. Trained in architecture, sound arts, and instrumental composition, Olivier blends acoustic and electronic elements to explore the limits between experimental, popular, and contemporary music. Influenced by noise, baroque, and post-minimalist genres, his compositions intricately weave together diverse sonic landscapes. Throughout the years, he collaborated notably with Björk, Nick Knight, Cat Power and Doug Aitken. He has released music on labels like Rephlex, Fatcat Records, 130701, and LINE. Additionally, he has also composed music for over fifty films, earning numerous awards at prestigious film festivals such as Venice, Sundance, and Cannes.

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Program

Présences imaginées (2024) 15’10

What will be left of our time after we're gone? An artificial entity attempts to remember our existence.

Présences imaginées is the first work in a series of compositions that seek to capture the sonic footprint of our contemporary civilization, as it might be perceived and reconstructed by an intelligent machine. The entirety of the sonic and musical material in this piece was generated by an artificial neural network, then composed as a classic acousmatic work, with minimal sound processing to preserve the unique quality of the generated sounds.

Felisha Ledesma (us/se)

Felisha Ledesma is a sound artist and musician currently based in Malmö, Sweden. A distinctly warm and organic palette permeates Ledesma’s work, each moment slowly unfolding into an intimate aural experience. Inspirations from the everyday are distilled into sonic memories that invite a meditative and deep listening.

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Program 

Uppender (2024) / 20’00

Uppender was commissioned for Ina GRM Focus in 2024. Uppender was created utilizing an updated multichannel version of the AMQR, a software synthesizer created in collaboration with Ess Mattisson.