October 29, 2025

Night 1 -
Bloc_2

1345 Ave. Lalonde, Montréal, QC H2L 5A9

Stéphane Roy (ca)

Stéphane Roy is an acousmatic composer. His art esthetics allow him, after thorough experimentations with sound materials, to extract expressive properties and give these works teleological motion.

Stéphane Roy is also a musicologist. He has written a number of papers and a book on the analysis of electroacoustic music (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2003), which earned him the 2003-04 Prix Opus — Book ofthe Year. His works have won several awards and mentions in national and international electroacoustic composition competitions. His album L’inaudible received the 2019-20 Prix Opus —Album of the year — Actuelle and Electroacoustic Music. His works have been programmed throughout Europe and the Americas.

He holds a doctorate in electroacoustic composition and a PhD in musicology, both from Université deMontréal. He has taught at the Université de Montréal, at Queen’s University (Ontario), and music conservatories both in Québec and abroad. From time to time, he gives lectures on his work.
Stéphane Roy is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC), member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), and his works have been published by various labels, including empreintes DIGITALes (Kaleidos, 1996; Migrations, 2003; L’inaudible, 2019; Coups de foudre, 2025). He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Groupe Le Vivier.

[English translation : François Couture]

Program
Après, les cendres (2023) 15’19”

Après, les cendres is an acousmatic work inspired by the poems ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) and Nous sommes installés sous le tonnerre… [Under thunder] taken from the collection of poems Pour les âmes (Typo, 1993) by Québécois author Paul-Marie Lapointe (1929-2011).

ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) evokes, among other things, humankind lulled by a false sense of security. The metaphor of sleep used in the text symbolizes an anesthetized conscience in the face of the unthinkable, as the lines “un bombardier repose à tes côtés / tes nuits sont assurées!” [a bomber rests by your side / your nights are safe!] ironically emphasize. In Nous sommes installés sous le tonnerre…, a terrible prophecy is announced: “le signe de la foudre marque les hommes au jour le jour” [the sign of lightning weighs on men day after day]. Fate governs our existence, and its inevitability haunts our minds.

The first three sections of Après, les cendres — noir présage, chants de mines, mur des silences — evoke the obsessive nature of fate and its manifestation in the realm of dreams. An introspective universe is created by the presence of ephemeral, furtive sounds, tormented, insistent melodies, and materials shaped by unstable spatial movements, all of which conspire to create a dreamlike universe. These sections conclude with a chimeric melody that seems to slide towards an abyss.

The final section of the work — incandescente fureur — begins with the fulfilled prophecy. A day of fury! The incandescent dawn rises in the thrust of a implacable martial motif inspired by the verses “dans la terreur arborescente des pics et des marteaux / dans le filet des sirènes / prisonniers des heures et des armes” [in the arborescent terror of spikes and hammers / in the net of sirens / prisoners of hours and arms] (Nous sommes installés sous le tonnerre…).

The work concludes with the pain left behind in the ashes of war, as perfectly expressed in this moving line: “les enfants se recroquevillent comme des feuilles brûlées” [children curl up like burnt leaves] (ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile)). We then witness the ascent of delicate, evanescent matter, freed from Earth’s gravity, like shattered souls pursuing their infinite journey.

Avec le temps... [excerpts] (2022-2024) 15’09”

•Tressaillement
•Errance
•Chute
•Fracture
•Fugacité

Time passing like a quiet caravan, a perpetual flow that ignores human beings with their consciousness of past, present and future, a movement that nothing can derail or slow down and that flows inexorably through infinite small slices of “present”: this is the background on which our existences unfold. Music, like any art of time, unfolds in this dimension, but at the same time it gives it a human face, creating an experiential time where the temporal flow, either precipitous and elusive or frozen in suspension, “remembers” or “anticipates,” contracts, dilates, and wraps around itself in an endless loop.

Avec le temps… is a 5.1 multichannel acousmatic suite that includes nine miniatures with their own temporal identity. These miniatures can be presented in variable geometry and assembled in a different order for each concert to highlight new dynamic relationships between them. I leave it to the listener to determine the temporality of these different moments. But beyond the temporal thematic, there is the music which dominates experiential time through its phonographies, its spatial configurations, its meaningful silences, its lyricism, and its fury. “Sound-footprints” recur at various moments throughout the acousmatic suite, as well as a leitmotiv formed by an iteration in echo, which can be regular, in contraction or in dilation, and which symbolizes experiential time.

Complete texts on electrocd

Credit : Maddi Berger

Album Launch
Coups de foudre, empreintes DIGITALes

Natasha Barrett (no/gb)

Natasha Barrett (NO/UK) is a composer, new media artist and researcher. She creates acousmatic, electronic,and live-electroacoustic music, public-space sound installations and audiovisual works. She is widely recognised for her artistic exploration of 3D sound and ambisonics. She is fascinated by the sound that the world has to offer - nature, culture, people, places; nuances, human expressions, performers and their instruments, and the distinctive ambiance of different spaces. In her music she tries to harness the energy, beauty and unique edgy rawness of these sounds, which all find their place inthe grand scheme of music. In addition to her solo career, she regularly collaborates with performers, visual artists, architects and scientists, often drawing on data emulating or created by real-world processes as asource for artistic exploration. Some of the highlights include 3D audiovisual artworks with the USA-based OpenEndedGroup, science-art sonification in collaboration with geoscientists, and live electronicscollaborations with soloists and ensembles such as Ensemble l’Itinéraire (FR) and Cikada (NO). She is also the co-director of the performance ensemble Electric Audio Unit that curates and performs spatial music concerts in Norway. Her work is commissioned and performed worldwide and has received awards in 35 international competitions, including the most prestigious prize available for Nordic composers, the Nordic Council Music Prize. Her music is released on Persistence of Sound (UK), Sargasso (UK), Lawo (NO), Aurora (NO), empreintes DIGITALes (CA), and numerous compilations. She has held professorships in Norway and Denmark, and now works freelance.

Program
Dusks Gait (2018) 12’00”

As dusk falls, an ecosystem of fictional creatures appear, projecting their characters through their gait, or in other words, the manner in which they move. Dusk's Gait celebrates moments of real nature that may easily expire. The composition captures many late evenings and nighttime experiences of nature, and fantasies behind the veil of darkness. Dusk’s Gait was composed during an Edgard Varèse guest professorship at the Electronic Studios of the Technical University Berlin, and in the composer’s own studio.

The Swifts of Pesaro (2024) 6’07”

In November 2023, while preparing for the premiere of a large orchestra and live electronics composition I had some days off from the intensity of performance, people and concert halls. To unwind, I visited a few ofthe recordings I made during the warm nights of Pesaro (Italy) earlier in the summer.

Experimenting with these recordings resulted in ambient and immersive soundscapes, which, unlike the high-energy composition materials I was currently working on, I didn't think much more of. It was also a time of meditation amidst the destruction wreaking havoc in the world in the end of 2023. Later on I found solace in these materials and experimented with how they could live on in a short composition. The result is The Swifts of Pesaro. Dedicated to eco-acoustics researcher and sound artist David Monacchi.

Toxic Colour (2024) 15’20”

Mining. Construction. Industry. Cleanup or coverup? The first outdoor exhibition showcasing aerial photography that captured the human impact on natural landscapes was "The Earth from the Air" by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, shown in Paris in 2000. The paradox of these mesmerising photos, incontrast to the often ravaged human-altered landscapes that they capture, has become the theme of many photo-art projects. Despite my being repeatedly drawn to such stunning imagery, their statements are becoming lost in our oversaturated world of digital visual media. I thought it was time to make a statement insound. Toxic Colour was commissioned by EAU with support from Arts and Culture Norway.

We thank the Norwegian Embassy in Ottawa for making the artist’s visit to Montreal possible.

Credit : Jan Erik Breimo

October 31, 2025

Night 3 -
8pm

1345 Ave. Lalonde, Montréal, QC H2L 5A9

Get your tickets

Julia E. Dyck

Julia E. Dyck is a Canadian artist and hypnotherapist based in Brussels whose multidisciplinary practice merges sound, performance, and expanded states of consciousness to explore the porous boundaries between body, technology, and the (sub)conscious. Rooted in relational and speculative methodologies, her work invites audiences into immersive experiences of collective transformation, using voice, vibration, and storytelling as portals to new modes of perception and presence. Julia is a member of the Audio Placebo Plaza collective and the t.r.a.n.c.e community hypnosis project.

Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Karachi Biennale (PK), LOOP (KR), Bétonsalon (FR), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), Cafe OTO (UK), Q-O2 (BE), Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (FR), Musée d’art de Joliette (CA), Musées d’art et d’histoire de Genève (CH), and Darling Founderie (CA).

Program
Introduction to Somnambulism 20’
Introduction to Somnambulism takes a hypnosis session as its score, moving from breath-led resonance through hypnotic induction and the frequencies of tuning forks toward a guided visualization. The performance weaves voice, electronics, and resonant instruments to explore the subconscious as a space for listening and transformation.

Credit : Laurens Leroy

Pía Baltazar, Daniela Huerta & Gadi Sassoon

Pia Baltazar is an intermedia composer, undisciplinary researcher, and curator. With formal training in engineering, art philosophy, and musical composition, her approach is situated at the intersection of interdisciplinary theory, interactive design, and artistic production. Her artistic research interests revolve around the creative possibilities of the encounters between the senses (vision, hearing, touch, etc.) and the involvement of physicality and spatiality, both in the creative process and in the aesthetic experience.

Born in Mexico, Daniela Huerta is a Berlin-based multimedia artist and researcher. Exploring the intersection of sound and consciousness, Huerta channels mythology and storytelling into a richly layered artistic practice that bridges the real and the imaginary, creating vivid landscapes that aim to connect with the depths of the human psyche. Rooted in myth and transmutation, her approach is equal parts raw and refined—a boundary-pushing exploration of sound as a narrative force.

Gadi Sassoon is a classically trained composer, performer, and transmedia electronic artist from Milan whose work spans traditional music releases, live performance, installations, and experimental software. Sassoon’s work appears on labels such as Ninja Tune, ASIP, Warner, and Universal, including projects nominated for the British Arrows, Brit Awards, and Mercury Prize; his synthesis research has been published in MIT Computer Music Journal. He was the keynote performer at the 2025 UN Global AI Summit and runs the community label and radio show Classical Computer Music.

Wilding AI is a nomadic, polymorphous research-creation laboratory that challenges the domestication of artificial intelligence to foster creative expression. The collective explores poetic, experimental, and hijacked (mis-)uses of generative algorithms, particularly in the field of spatial audio, to investigate new forms of human-machine collaboration. With a focus on public engagement, Wilding AI has conducted several research-creation residencies and open presentations at renowned digital arts spaces, including MUTEK Montreal and SAT, MUTEK Mexico, MONOM Studios as part of the CTM Festival in Berlin, and 4DSOUND at the FIBER Festival in Amsterdam.

Program
Ghosts of Future Grafts 12’15”
Pía Baltazar, Daniela Huerta & Gadi Sassoon

Ghosts of Future Grafts is one of the artistic outcomes of Wilding AI, a year-long collective research-creation project questioning the role and impact of AI in artistic creation, with a focus on spatial audio. Starting from the premise of considering AI agents as collaborators rather than tools, the three composers experimented with various generative systems for audio generation and spatialization, reflecting on the impact of AI as a general-purpose technology on our existence. Focusing in particular on the question of embodiment—both from the perspective of the creative tools and of the effect AI has on our nervous systems—the composers adopted a posture of refusal and generated the materials of the composition solely through performances with voice and analog synthesizers, stemming from a session at Gadi Sassoon’s Milan studio, immersing in it and considering it as an instrument of its own.

In a second phase, during a residency at UdeM, they worked on the spatial sculpting of this raw material to shape it as a kind of sacrificial ritual of the ghosts of AI agents, an exorcism of their invasion of our nervous systems. The piece was included in the collective composition FERAL FREQUENCIES, premiered in SAT’s dome on MUTEK’s opening and diffused at SPATIAL Festival at MONOM at Funkhaus Berlin in August and September 2025. It is presented at Akousma for the first time as a standalone composition.

Pia Baltazar

Daniela Huerta - Credit: Felix Baßle

Gadi Sassoon- Credit: Luigi Ziliani 2025

James O’Callaghan

James O’Callaghan is a Canadian composer and multimedia artist based in Berlin. His work has been described as “very personal… with its own colour anchored in the unpredictable” (Goethe-Institut). It spans chamber, orchestral, live electronic, and acousmatic idioms, audio installations, video-music, site-specific performances, electronic dance music, and interdisciplinary collaboration—most recently with choreographer Édouard Lock and artist Lois Brown.

In 2016, an album of his acousmatic works, Espaces Tautologiques, was released by empreintes DIGITALes, and his extended collaboration with Ensemble Paramirabo resulted in a portrait album of his works in 2019, entitled Alone and Unalone. His music has been performed in 29 countries and has received nearly forty prizes and nominations, including the ISCM Young Composer Award (2017), the Salvatore Martirano Award (2016), and the SOCAN Foundation John Weinzweig Grand Prize (2014). Significant nominations include the Gaudeamus Award (2016), Prix Métamorphoses (2018), and two JUNO Awards (2014, 2020). In 2021, he received the Prix Opus for “Composer of the Year.”

Program
[Creation] 20’00”

Credit : Sanyam Bajaj

Anne-F. Jacques (ca)

Anne-F Jacques is a scrap metal worker and sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, oblique interactions between materials, and the construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects, and unpolished sounds. She regularly creates installations, performances, and ephemeral interventions. She has worked, among others, with Tsonami Festival (Chile), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Ftarri (Tokyo), Sonic Protest (Paris), Casa del Lago (Mexico), Centrale for Contemporary Arts (Brussels), High Zero (Baltimore), and MEM (Bilbao).

Program
Mouches à feu [Creation] 20’

Electricity, a little friction, and a light flowing through our fingers. It crackles, it fades, it smells warm. You could almost start dancing.

IRL [Amanda Harvey]

IRL is a sound artist, producer, and DJ whose practice uses waveforms to explore memory, the body, and space. Working with lo-fi sample banks alongside analog and modular synthesis, they craft music that balances raw texture with emotional depth. Their trance-inducing sets weave ambient drone, big bass, and looping melodies into immersive soundscapes that invite reflection and transformation.

Beyond performance, IRL co-produced two seasons of the podcast A Kind of Harmony and hosts Heart Full, a monthly radio show on n10.as. Their releases span labels including SURF (LX), Psychic Liberation (BE), Kapha Selections (NYC), Personal Records (MTL), and Interzone (MTL).

Program
[TBA] 20’

William Jourdain, alias Automatisme

William Jourdain, known under the moniker of Automatisme, is creating generative ambient dubtechno since 2011 and is active as an archivist and digital development agent. He has been publishingon various labels such as Constellation Records, Force Inc. / Mille Plateaux, Neologist Productions,Liberation Through Hearing, Outlines, Dream Disk Lab, G89 Records, Fallen Moon Recordings,Diffuse Reality Records / Teorema, Archipel, Polygon Network and Humidex.

Program
[Live Set] 20’
William Jourdain (Montreal, CA), aka Automatisme, is a generative ambient dub techno artist. For Akousma 2025, he reshapes live his 2025's works, released on Humidex, Diffuse Reality and Archipel record labels. Sound design here is an act of shaping and carving, using principles like repetition, contrast, density and echo to evoke emotional states such as intensity and release. Automatisme thrives in the generative music terrain where he blurs the line between sonic art and dreamlike exploration.

Orchestroll

Orchestroll is an interdisciplinary music duo, a crucible for the bold aspirations of Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille. It is a space for sonic exploration where they challenge the boundaries of music theory, genres, and classifications—a free environment where sound territories merge and transform beyond conventional limits.
Their work is rooted in deep artistic introspection, fueled by a passion for questioning musical codes and a profound belief in the transformative power of art. Orchestroll fuses disparate elements—ambient, noise, new-age, post-industrial, Americana, folk, musique concrète, pop, rock, orchestral, and indie—sometimes filtered through the lens of underground club music. These styles intertwine and overlap, forming a spectral imprint, an aesthetic residue of a constantly evolving soundscape.

Program
Corrosiv (extraits) 20’
In 2025, Orchestroll released their double album Corrosiv on 29 Speedway, preceded by the singles Velvet Myst and Cable Eater.

Partly recorded at the legendary EMS Studios in Stockholm, this project interrogates cultural stagnation and the erosion of artistic depth, while highlighting the processes that strip sound of its reach and substance. Corrosiv explores sonic degradation, much like language worn down through repetition, recycling, and detachment. At the intersection of tension and form, the work blends heavy, slow-moving structures with textures that gradually decay. It stands as both a mirror and a resistance to the forces that tend to render music passive, reducing it to mere background noise or a detached aesthetic.