A sample of each of the five tracks from my upcoming acousmatic album, inspired in part by procedural notions borrowed from avant-gardist cuisine:

I- Changing Texture and Function: layered drones and soundscape through progressive sound transformation
II- Dematerializing: extreme time-stretching and compressing; juxtaposition of extremely close versus extremely far
III- Replicating: takes an initial set of food-related sounds through a game of “telephone”
IV- Reconfiguring: a tonic axis upon which short sound material is layered
V- Simulating: a short “soundalike” voyage where what sounds appear to be is not what they really are

A big thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting this project and to audio engineer Andrew Yankiwski of Precursor Productions in Winnipeg for providing audio training and consultation expertise.

Teaser_Acousmatic Album

For plucked strings (harp, harpsichord, guitar, double bass) and fixed media. The inspiration for Jeu de rôle (“Role play”) was twofold. Firstly, I was inspired by abstract visual art and more specifically the work of German painter Gerhard Richter, who incorporates digital media into his paintings. In composing this piece, I started by focusing on texture and I saw the piece as an ever-evolving canvas. I wanted to experiment with the use of the “point” (on its own, en masse, combined into rising or descending lines which may be articulated or smooth) as well as with a variety of textures, from very dense ones to very sparse ones. My second source of inspiration was the play of timbral ambiguities between the four instruments and the electronics. I had fun trying to make one instrument sound like another and we spend time in each instrument’s sonic world throughout the piece. The electronic sections of the piece alternate with the instrumental sections, taking a turn at occupying a solo role and evoking the instruments different textures and timbres in their own way.

Commissioned and performed by Ensemble Punctum, Montreal.

Image from Krems, 1986 by Gerhard Richter

Jeu de rôle

On October 9, 2009, NASA carried out a “moon-bombing” using its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).  The impact lifted “a plume of material that might not have seen direct sunlight for billions of years.”  What might this have sounded like and how do we feel about this?  This piece recounts the event and imagines a sonic equivalent to the strangely poetic visual descriptions of it.

LCROSS 2009-10-09

In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon, for double bass and fixed media, uses the text of the children’s story “Goodnight Moon” (by Margaret Wise Brown) to explore the psychological effect of nighttime, and the dual sense of security/insecurity that we first experience as children.  

Commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto) with funding from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.  
Performed by Adam Scime

Text used with the permission of HarperCollins.
Image from Goodnight Moon, Pictures by Clement Hurd.

In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon

U-29 is inspired by “The Temple”, a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, one of the pioneers of the horror literary genre.  It tells the story of a German submarine, the U-29, which is gradually taken over by a supernatural force which ultimately draws it down to an abandoned temple in a lost city at the bottom of the ocean. In this piece, the synthesizer part represents the supernatural force which takes over the submarine and I sought to develop a cause and effect relationship between the instrumental and electronic parts. 

Commissioned and performed by Ensemble Paramirabo, Montreal

U-29

Refracted Moonlight is a creative reinterpretation of the song "The Colour of Moonlight" from the pop artist Grimes' 2012 Visions album. It features voice, clarinet, viola, harp, keyboard and sound files. It was commissioned by the Plumes Ensemble and the Cluster Festival of New Music + Integrated Art for the 2017 Many Visions tour, which featured creative arrangements and deconstructions of the entire Visions album by 12 different Canadian composers. 

Plumes Ensemble: Veronica Charnley (vocals), Katie Schoepflin (clarinets), Pemi Paull (viola), Éveline Grégoire-Rousseau (harp), Geof Holbrook (keyboard)

Refracted Moonlight (Grimes reinterpretation)

In Finding Common Ground, each “melodic” instrument is paired with a percussion instrument: the flute with the maracas, the clarinet with the crotales, the violin with the temple blocks and the cello with the suspended cymbal.  The sounds produced on each melodic instrument are inspired by its percussive “twin”.  

Performed by Laura Bates, Gabriel Paquin-Buki, Elizabeth Adams, Sonya Matoussova and Olivier Maranda.  Conducted by Alexandra Fol.

Finding Common Ground

Pleine lune is a piece for double bass and fixed media inspired by the notions of lunacy and lycanthropy (werewolvism) often associated with the full moon.  The bass is lead through a journey of transformation by an altered version of itself (represented by the fixed media).

Performed by Pierre-Alexandre Maranda.

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