Charles Harding - biography

Charles Harding (he/him) is an emerging sound maker living in Tiohti:áke / Mooniyang / Montréal. His current focus spans various artistic disciplines including algorithmic composition, soundscape design, and creative coding. Having spent many years studying electroacoustic composition he has been fortunate to inherit a deep inner joy for breaking the paradigms of his perception, to hear old sounds as new, and to welcome new perspectives from which to navigate his experience in the world. Over the past several years he has had opportunities to showcase research, projects and collaborations involving immersive and interactive audiovisual installations at the likes of ImageFest in Colombia and Visiones Sonoras in Mexico. More recently, he released a collection of soundscape pieces called Rain Beast, a collage of field recordings documented in New Brunswick and Montréal between 2018 and 2021. As part of a greater meditation on connecting technological mediums in artistic practice to notions of Anthropocene, this collection reflects upon the dissonances of nature and industry in the south of NB. Although his practice is deeply intertwined with technological tools, he always seeks to build links to nature and organic material, framing everyday sights and sounds to be heard in novel ways.

Program

Unsequestered - 8’21 - Soundscape

Unsequestered reflects upon the modern difficulty of trying to escape to places detached from the presence of other humans. The space and setting of recordings for this piece is the public area of O’dell park, located in Fredericton, New Brunswick. With field recording contributions collected on a sound walk with composers Erin Goodine, Emily Kennedy, and Mark Kleyn, in January 2021, this composition draws the listener through a story of forest sounds and the interruptions of human traffic ever-present along the park’s Arboretum Trail. Inspiration for this piece can be directly attributed to some works by Barry Truax such as Pacific Fanfare and Island as well as several of his papers relating to field recording and granular synthesis in composition. It is encouraged that the listener tries to imagine that the forest is asking a question of the audience. The content of the question can only be known when the audience truly listens.


Tin Can Elsa & Southern NB - 9’20 - Soundscape

East Coast Song Sparrows, New Brunswick Southern railway, gentle waves at Tin Can Beach, drips and ripples at the Irving Nature Park, the hum of a pulp mill, tropical drips from storm Elsa, and sounds from the family home backyard on the city of Saint John’s lower west side. The combination of these sounds might seem warmly familiar to someone from the city as they represent an integral portion of the overall soundscape. Those unfamiliar with the city may, more abstractly, find themselves immersed in a slurry of coastal nature and industry. Saint John is a mainly blue-collar port-city in the South of New Brunswick. It is home to the massive and problematic Irving oil corporation whose industries span the province with refineries, shipyards, clearcutting operations, and pulp mills. The dissonance of this corporation is highlighted with an assemblage of significant mechanical soundmarks that are starkly juxtaposed by a rolling, diverse landscape of agrestal nature, stony beaches and vast ocean space. The vision for this composition was to project the blend of nature and industry constantly at odds in the city. My nostalgia from having lived in the city is addressed with the inclusion of a droning tonal base derived from a piano recording collected from my family home, a compositional echo.

This piece was composed using material collected from several soundwalks in Saint John NB throughout the summer of 2021. Inspiration for the piece came from primer listenings of Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk and Barry Truax’s Pacific Fanfare and Island as well as many meditations on identifying some of the significant soundmarks of Saint John collected through field recording sessions.

The 2 pieces are part of the album Rain Beast which was released on the New Brunswick label Countain Downstairs in June 2022.

Operaa - biography

Operaa is the pseudonym of Montreal based producer and sound artist Tatum Wilson. His work examines themes of escapism, depersonalization, and healing through experimental compositions that blend influences of ambient, minimalist, and electroacoustic music.

Program

A Loss for More Than Words - 20’ - Acousmatic

A Loss For More Than Words is for a lover, a point of focus, a body that propped you. It’s the soundscape when reaching for life 2.0, giving ears to turmoil, the comedown staring at the face of what hurts. You can mute what's terrene, you can exit from here still lucid, for a moment- yet like a memory that's far but legible, it's always fading, never gone.

Pauline Patie - biography

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..

Program

Cent Sens - 15’ - A/V

Our way of perceiving the world has been influenced by visual and sonic codes since our early childhood. With this performance, I have tried to explore my subjectivity through an expressive discourse based around abstract sounds and shapes.

The piece was premiered at Usine C (Montréal) during Akousma 18, on October 12, 2022.

Pablo Geeraert - biography

Pablo Geeraert is a young Belgian composer born in Brussels, and currently based in Montreal. He explores composition as a means to discover and experience the complex yet exciting dimensions that music can offer. Influenced and fascinated by a wide variety of musical genres, his work tries to blend them into modern and kinetic-driven pieces. Moving from contemporary acousmatic to popular discourses, his music focuses on sound sculpture and experiential narratives as primary aspects. Collaboration within different artistic contexts is a crucial part of his creative research. The intricacies found in the visual medias, contemporary dance choreographies, and other multidisciplinary practices serve as inspiration and motivation to broaden and reinforce his artistic identity.

Having recently graduated with BFAs in Music Production (BIMM Berlin) and in Electroacoustic Studies (Concordia University), he is currently finishing a master’s degree in Electroacoustic Composition at the Conservatoire de Montréal.

Program

Edges Order - 24’13 - Acousmatic

Edges Order is a piece that was finished very recently. I would probably need to step back a little before I could write a program note. I am still questioning what it is, what it says, and the work process necessary to its creation.

I know that it is a first try at developing the long form and discovering new structural organisations. The piece tries to exist inside a non-affirmed slowness. The different musical elements take their time to evolve, yet they are pushed to do so. Edges Order is imperfectly coherent. Its discourse seems dichotomic without being entirely so. A variety of functional parameters evolve over the duration of the piece without ever being completely unified nor separated.

It is a work that allowed me to explore, deconstruct, and even challenge my own musical thinking. It is part of an ongoing and never-ending artistic research. It doesn’t try to define who I am as a composer, but rather to expand the box of tools necessary to keep on exploring and discovering music.