2025 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.

Vivian Li (cn/ca)

A recent graduate of Université de Montréal, Vivian Li is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based sound artist and composer whose work explores the interplay between memory, presence, and the ephemeral nature of lived experience. Through field recordings, radiophonic techniques, and spatial composition, they construct immersive sonic environments that drift between documentary and poetry—where laughter, rain, and half-heard conversations become resonant archives of lived experience. She has performed and presented work at venues and festivals nationally and internationally, such as Karachi Biennale, Akousma (Montréal), MUTEK(Montréal), Pique (Ottawa), Sound Art Lab (Struer), Inkonst (Malmö), Eastern Bloc(Montréal), perte de signal (Montréal), Kwia (Berlin), and Fondation Phi x Nuit Blanche (Montréal).


Program

Sonic Memories of Fleeting Times | 流声逝忆 (2025) 15’00”

Spatialized by Maxime Gordon

Sonic Memories of Fleeting Times | 流声逝忆 is a multiphonic, spatialized acousmatic piece that adopts a documentarist approach, exploring themes of intimacy, memory, and time through an aesthetic inspired by radio art. The work draws on autobiographical sound recordings — capturing moments at once mundane, intimate, and deeply personal — to create an immersive experience that transports the listener into another reality, another space-time.

*

A collection of lived experiences—
laughter, rain, eavesdropped conversations—
preciously fading, as they form.

To remember is to listen closely,
before they recede into the realm of memories.

~ ~ ~

“The curated recording is a hedge against mortality, the fragility of memory, and the ever-receding substance of history.” — Jonathan Sterne

Bruno Belardi (it)

Bruno Belardi is a musician and composer from Naples. He studies Classical Double Bass and explores Electronic Music under the guidance of Elio Martusciello at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples. His works have been presented at festivals such as Artescienza (Italy), Tempo Reale (Italy), Apnées – Paysages | Composés (France), Lisboa Incomum – Projecto DME(Portugal), Overdrive NYC (USA), and Ignite the Arts Festival (Canada). His acousmatic pieces have been recognized as finalists at MA/IN (2024), Musicacoustica Hangzhou (China, 2024), Soundcinema Düsseldorf (Germany, 2024), and Concurso Destellos (2024). Bruno has also been awarded at the Totem Electroacoustic Contest (2025) and Landscape (2024).

Program
Gaman  11’01”
Award-winning piece of the Akousma Prize at the 2025 Totem Electroacoustic Competition

Gaman is a Japanese concept that evokes resilience, perseverance, and the quiet strength required to endure adversity. This piece investigates not only the boundaries of such endurance, but also its fragility — suggesting that, in the tension between resistance and collapse, a form of beauty or inner force can emerge. From a compositional standpoint, the piece is built around strong dynamic contrasts: moments of suspension and stillness are interrupted by abrupt sonic outbursts. This alternation reflects the internal struggle between maintaining balance and being overwhelmed by external pressures. Spatialization plays a crucial role, helping to shape a listening space that mirrors the surrounding chaos — while also tracing the listener’s effort to remain grounded within it. The sound material comes entirely from the acoustic instruments of Productions Totem Contemporain (PTC)

We thank the Italian Cultural Institute of Montreal for making the artist’s presence at the festival possible.

Philippe Macnab-Séguin (ca)

Philippe Macnab-Séguin is a composer of instrumental, fixed-media, and mixed music whose work combines, collides, and refracts diverse styles through the lens of new media technologies such as spatial audio, live electronics, video, and smart phone applications. His music reflects his eclectic musical background spanning metal, jazz, South Indian percussion, Barbershop, glitch and experimental pop production. He and producer Nicolas Gaumond form the prog-pop duo Greetings From The Hole, and Aural Sonology, a phenomenological method of musical analysis, plays a large role in his research.

He has received over 25 scholarships and awards for his work, including the Prix d’Europe, a BMI award, 2nd placein the Graham Sommer Competition for Young Composers, four SOCAN young composer awards, a JTTP award, and funding from the SSHRC and FRQSC. He received his D.Mus in composition from McGillUniversity under the supervision of Jean Lesage.

Program 
Gone for Eggs 23’34”

"Just as life gestates in the egg, so in ancient healing rituals would initiates withdraw into a dark cave or holeto “incubate” until a healing dream released them reborn into the upper world, in the same way the chickcrawls out of the egg.”-The Book of Symbols, The Archive For Research In Archetypal Symbolism

Every night, we experience a small taste of death when we lose consciousness in the depths of sleep. Every morning, we are born anew. Gone For Eggs takes this fundamental experience as a starting point to explore the oscillation between day and night, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death. The texts were written by Philippe Macnab-Séguin and Nicholas Papaxanthos; portions of the Book of Symbols reproduced with permission from The Archive For Research In Archetypal Symbolism.

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.

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.

Ana María Romano G. (co)

Ana María Romano G. is a Colombian composer, interdisciplinary sound artist, teacher, and researcher. Her creations are situated at the intersection of sound and technology, questioning listening, space, the body, gender and sexuality, improvisation, experimentation, soundscape, noise, interspecies relations, eroticism, and affects.

Her research aims to expand each work so that it can explore new avenues (installation, online repertoire, concert, archive, fixed media/mixed pieces, performing arts, radio). She places great importance on collaborative-collective spaces as well as interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogues. She considers political dimensions and creation to be inseparable.

She conducted extensive research on Jacqueline Nova, a key composer of Colombian electroacoustic music. She is currently conducting research on the leading figures of electronic music in Latin America.

Professor at El Bosque University, she coordinates the feminist platform En Tiempo Real. She is the co-founder of Paisajistas Sonoras. She participated in the management of the digital space GexLat–Gender–Experimentation–Latin America and the Network of Latin American Women Composers redcLa.

She regularly conducts artistic and academic activities in Colombia and internationally.

Program

De que las hay las hay (2022–2025)

In my recent creations, the need to deploy and evolve them has become more pronounced. Thus, the work De que las hay las hay was first presented as a sound installation (2022), then expanded into concerts, online as a repertoire, performances, and archives. What we hear here is the expansion of the work into an electroacoustic piece on a fixed support (2025).

The work invites us to listen in the broadest possible dimensions, weaving the worlds of human voices with those of plants and everything that emerges from these encounters. It is primarily inspired by the need to reclaim the figure of the witch through listening, encounters, and orality. The witch this work highlights is one who acquires her knowledge through practice, in a collective setting, in exchange with other witches; one who finds in orality an active means of transmitting this knowledge and a precious resource for preserving it over time. They are witches who listen to the secrets of plants...

For me, it is fascinating to intertwine creation with the presences/voices of other women. For this work, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the witches who shared their knowledge, their silences, their intonations, their secrets, their sonorous and affectionate presences: Adina Izarra, Ana Mora, AngieFigueredo, Aniara Rodado, Candida Ferreira, Carmen Caro, Diana Restrepo, Diana Vergel, Elena Villamil, Emi Bahamonde, Isabel Nogueira, Laura Valbuena, Laura Wiesner, Laura Zapata, Liliana Alpala, Liliana Vargas, Lina Cabrera, Marcela Gómez, Marcela Perrone, Marcela Romano, Marcia Cabrera, Maria Teresinha da Silva, Marta Cabrera, Natalia Quiceno, Sara Fernández, Susana Restrepo, Vanessa Villegas, Ximena Alarcón, Zoila Arias and Zoitsa Noriega.

I also deeply thank the plants that transmit their secrets and healing powers to us: Wormwood, Indian acacia, Yarrow, Garlic, Aloe vera, Alstroemeria, Anise, Artichoke, Basil, Boldo, Cacao, Calendula, Cinnamon, Canelon, Maidenhair, Chamomile, Lemon/green lemon, Lemongrass, Cloves, Coca, Copal, Fig, Orange blossom, Ginger, Hibiscus, Jasmine, Lavender, Flax, Limonaria, Mango, Daisy, Mint, Pennyroyal, Spearmint, St. John's wort, Walnut, Coconut, Red onion, Orange, Oregano, Paico, Passion flower, Pate gallina, Parsley, Rose petals, Chili, Pine, Pear, Pepper, Apple, Potato, Horsetail, Grape, Rosemary, Rue, Sage, Elderberry, Tea, Thyme, Tote, Lemon Verbena.

We thank our partner No Hay Banda for making the artist’s presence in Montréal possible.

Joseph Sannicandro (us)

Joseph Sannicandro is a writer and artist based in Montreal, focusing on creative laborand (un)popular culture, with a particular attention to sound. He is co-founder of themusic blog A Closer Listen, producer of the Sound Propositions podcast, and currently lectures in Media Studies at SUNY Purchase. Joseph’s musical compositions and sound art projects have been published by international labels, broadcast on community and internet radio stations, presented in festivals such as Montreal’s Suoni per il Popolo, and at galleries and museums including IKLEKTIK (London), Diagonale (Montreal), the Museodel Sannio (Benevento, Italy) and the Istanbul Cinema Museum.

Program
al-rambla / Las Ramblas 20'
Comprised primarily of recordings of rivers, fountains, aqueducts, irrigation canals, and waterwheels in Granada (Andalucía) and Blanca (Murcia), al-rambla / Las Ramblas blurs boundaries between traditional and modern, rural and urban, Muslim and Christian, attending to the circulation of water as a means of challenging these supposed binaries. Field recordings made during a sound art residency at Centro Negra (AADK Spain).

Rehab Hazgui (tn/ca)

Rehab Hazgui is a composer and sound artist. Her work explores ways of learning new forms of language through conscious listening and the relationships that beings maintain with their culture, heritage, society, and landscape, conceived as living and engaged participants. Her research investigates how sound emerges within dynamic landscapes whether biological, geophysical, or shaped by human transformations. Her practice focuses above all on the act of listening, understood as an experience that shapes our perception of space, nurtures our relationship to it, and reveals the profound engagement that hearing establishes with the world.

Program 
Chôra (premiere) 10’00”
Chôra explores sound as a perceptive matrix, a receptive space in which sonic phenomena emerge without ever being fully contained. The installation unfolds continuously evolving soundscapes that leave traces in the listener’s memory while shaping their perception of space and time. Each sequence functions as a fleeting imprint, revealing how listening brings presence into being and structures our relationship to the world. The work highlights the tension between place and what manifests within it, between memory and perception, emphasizing that sound, like Chôra, is both the condition for and the revelation of sensible experience. This work has been conceived exclusively for Akousma.

Christian Bouchard (ca)

Christian Bouchard creates unique and captivating sonic worlds through the fluid assemblage of soundscapes, experimental electronics, glitch, and acousmatic art. His musical style can be described as a thrilling interplay where energetic moments with nervous overtones are counterbalanced by moments of suspension. For some, this may be a musical universe free of reference points where one can get lost, but where one can also let oneself be carried away without worrying about form.

Christian Bouchard studied electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal under Yves Daoust. He practices music for theater, film, installation music, and more recently, ambient music. He is a founding member (with Christian Calon, Mario Gauthier, and Monique Jean) of the live electroacoustic quartet Theresa Transistor. His music has won composition awards in various national and international competitions. His most recent album IV, on empreintes DIGITALes, was named album of the year at the Prix Opus in 2025. Christian Bouchard also works as a sound recordist in cinema.

Program 
Spirale plastique (2024) 20’04”

Remember the ocean of plastic? It was a hot topic several years ago, Go see it today. The horror... But from a sound perspective, imagine plunging microphones into it to hear the different textures, shapes, and sizes of plastic swirling around: pellets, bags, bottles, containers, always rotating in the same direction at different speeds. Let's swirl together in this plasticized, recyclable, compostable, and listenable suite.

Produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Robert Schwarz (au)

Robert Schwarz incorporates a background in computer music, sound studies, and architecture into his installations, live performances, and recorded music. By approaching acoustic phenomena that are usually hidden from our perception, and through the subtle interplay of field recordings and sound synthesis, he creates abstract structures that suggest deep, dissociative states of listening and encourage a critical examination of established listening practices.

Schwarz has released critically acclaimed albums for Superpang, Gruenrekorder, ETAT, and ALTER, and developed a series of walk-in sculptures in Los Angeles, Brussels, and Vienna. He has presented works at institutions and festivals such as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Wien, Tokyo Arts and Space, CTM Berlin, Skaņu Mežs, and Musikprotokoll. Schwarz was selected for the 2023/24 year of the SHAPE+ Platform for innovative music and audiovisual art and is co-founder and curator of the PARKEN festival in Vienna.

Program
Stridulation 1-14  30’00” (2024-2025)

Robert Schwarz will present a condensed live version of his latest album Stridulations 1–14, specially arranged for Akousma’s acousmonium. Through solitary chirps and roaring synchrony, insects and arthropods communicate via “stridulations,” the diverse calls produced by rasping friction between two chitinous body parts.
On Stridulations 1–14, Vienna-based sound artist Robert Schwarz offers a speculative resynthesis of these calls in tandem with ethological field recordings of real-world insect life. Continuing themes introduced in Schwarz’s previous release Clear Cues (ETAT, 2022) and partly derived from a 2023 composition commissioned by ORF’s Musikprotokoll, Stridulations 1–14 investigates the audible characteristics of entomological communication, with particular focus on the spatio-temporal sonic patterns emerging from swarm behaviour and synchrony.
Grounded in two decades of field recording, Schwarz guides listeners through richly textured, abstract sonic entities that invite a dissociative listening state. Constantly shifting the boundary between natural and synthetic, Stridulations 1–14 follows an internal logic informed by intraspecies acoustic communication, crafting a stirring, disorienting sound environment that opens alternative perspectives on the relationships between humans, animals, and machines.

We thank the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Québec Office in Berlin for making the artist’s stay in Montréal possible.

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.

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.

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”

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.