From the outset of Akousma’s first evening on Wednesday, October 16, Mikael Meunier-Bisson introduced us to his musicfriend, Vivian Li welcomed us into familiar contexts, Byron Westbrook got us thinking about the concept of remanence.
Mikael Meunier-Bisson (ca)
Program: musicfriend (2024) 8’00”
A composer of experimental and electroacoustic music, Mikael, an experienced self-taught enthusiast of textured ambient, presented his piece entitled musicfriend. Borrowing the technique of materiology, mainly from the field of painting where the use and assembly of various materials, often heterogeneous, create works of art, he is able to transcend the limits of the traditional.
Combining collage and montage, the performance drew on the elasticity of sound, from nothingness to infinity, interspersed with soft layers. The emphasis was on “reverse”, where the physical inversion of part of the tape allowed us to bounce back as quickly as possible to the clarity of a singular, luminous note.
Tonicity. Abstract globality. Onirism. This 8-minute work was laced with electro-acoustic violin or similar effects. Every second, a new sonority or texture came into play, as at minute 2’11 of an astonished vocal. In the end, the overall listening sensation was rather gentle and soaring, even meditative.
The corpus of the work was highlighted by the use of modified frequency. The rhetoric of this project was definitely “strewn with doubts, trials and errors, in a continuous coming and going”.
Vivian Li (cn/ca)
Program: Memory Playback (2024) 7’00”
Here are 7 minutes of a sonic diary pierced by field recordings in the style of sonic archaeology, tending towards the familiar and introspective. Vibrant resonance of interior and exterior decor. Salient feature of bird vocalizations. Synth note. Distant conversation in Mandarin. A touch of sweetness and nostalgia. The more we listened to the piece, the more the auditory sequences clashed or blurred in a controlled blur, like the play of memory, which compartmentalizes and mixes memories according to the emotions.
In the last third, clear notes of electrified string instruments could be heard. Children’s laughter in a “new age” echo. The winner of the Concours de Composition Acousmatique petites formes 2024 thus explored in depth the “therapeutic and temporal properties of sound” to sublimate them in Memory Playback.
A regular at national and international festivals 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, Vivian Li won over the Akousma audience with the sincerity of her work.
Byron Westbrook (us)
Program: Translucents (Remix) (2024) 20’00’’
Sculptural and immersive, this abstract musical embroidery was worthy of a performative installation in a contemporary art museum. Tapestries of urban field recordings such as a train, a helicopter in mid-air, the echo of road traffic, birds chattering, the scene of life on the way home… combined with performative electronic music, repetitive in sequence and inspired by concrete music.
Ideally, it would be preferable to mention scenes like chapters that open and close with a real construction, a display and mediation of raw sounds that are made, unmade or recast at times with jolts of twists and springs of sound.
Translucents plunges you into the complex, textured weave of memory, where inner and outer spaces detach and annihilate each other. Between each phase of sounds captured in the field, an electronic, acousmatic or concrete musical scene intruded abruptly, as if to symbolize the complex transmission of memories and the neuronal system. Then, without transition, we moved on to a pseudo-pause of pitch or frequency modulation, sometimes tending towards the drone.
The original piece lasts 40 minutes, but for the Festival, a remix has been reworked to last just 20 minutes, concentrating all the energy of the work.
His work has been shown at the Walker Art Center, ICA London, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, MaerzMusik and Rewire festivals, among others.
To fully grasp the complexity of this composition, it’s a good idea to listen to the piece, available online, while observing the paintings of abstract artist Blinky Palermo to blend in with the process. Byron was inspired by them. We can safely conclude that the phenomenon of afterglow sought by the New Yorker has been achieved.
Photo Credit: Caroline Campeau
