A packed Outremont Theatre, full of Montreal’s Portuguese residents and lovers of fado music, was left stunned by Carminho and her band’s performance, which sometimes felt like an intimate opera, a live baring of one’s soul.

“I’ve been singing fado since I was in my mother’s womb,” Carminho told the audience, donning an all-black dress and black leather gloves. She kind of looked like a harbinger from the Underworld, and based on her professional demeanor, it seemed that she would be very serious. But her look was just that—a look—as she was actually quite humourous; cracking jokes with the audience, playing off her minimal French and broken English for a bit of levity between songs on her latest album Portuguesa and a few earlier works.

When she said she had been singing fado in the womb, this was no word of a lie. Her mother, Teresa Siqueira, is also a famous fado singer, and growing up, Carminho was surrounded by musicians in fado houses, so the lifestyle of fado music is deep within Carminho’s blood. And those who had no idea what fado was were given a brief history listen by Carminho. For her, fado is life, her language, a way to express the passion and hardships of the Portuguese people. With an origin story dating back farther than the 1800s, fado music follows a traditional structure and often sounds mournful, with long dramatic pauses for the singer to hold a specific impassioned note.

Carminho’s voice is full of life and sorrow, packed with a dramatic flare that shakes you into submission, leaving you speechless, whether you understand what the song is about or not. yet, Carminho wanted the audience to know what the songs were about, in fact, that was part of the show. A history lesson of fado, but also where the songs came from; what Portuguese poets wrote them, and which of Carminho’s friends gave her the blessing to add music to their poems.

One song was about two lovers who find they are feeling nothing for each other. “I’m wondering if there is a couple in the audience tonight who this song is about,” Carminho said as the audience chuckled. Another song was Carminho’s reimagining of a classic poem about a young girl going to a fountain, only to be bothered by “birds,” who it seems are actually men. Carminho rewrote the lyrics to have it be a man going to the fountain instead. “It’s true that lots of fado has always been, male and chauvinistic, with the men writing the poems for the women to sing, so I wanted to change that,” Carminho said. And changing that was no small feat. Carminho had to get a blessing from the original poet’s family and have it signed off by the Portuguese Society of Authors. When it comes to fado, poetry, and art in general, artistic merit and copyright seem to be of huge importance in Portugal.

Carminho has also been called an innovator of fado for introducing the mellotron, electric guitar, and lap steel guitar on top of the traditional setup of nylon bass, acoustic nylon guitar, and the Portuguese guitar. Due to this setup, during her set, there were more traditional fado songs focusing on the trills and scales of the Portuguese guitar and more modern reimaginings with the warm tones of the mellotron and haunting lap steel guitar lines. This made the performance varied, without a dull moment.

Is it possible to enter sound? That’s the question electroacoustic music seems intent on answering. Surrounded by the thirty loudspeakers of the acousmonium installed at Usine C, we had the impression of being enveloped in sound in motion.

To open its 19^th edition, the Akousma festival offered a diverse range of works skilfully crafted using a variety of technological processes. With 7 decades of development behind it, this classic of electro music is no stranger to renewal. Yesterday, we could hear the most academic to the most secular aesthetics. Apart from the two performances, there was absolutely nothing to see, but plenty to hear. Everything was fixed in place, as if you were going to see a film with no image, but bouncing with action.

Francis Dhomont

At 96, Francis Dhomont has literally written the history of electroacoustics. In fact, his piece Somme toute acted as a ‘best of’ of his career. It was broadcast by Louis Dufort, Dhomont’s former student and artistic director of Akousma, who didn’t miss the opportunity to underline the French composer’s enormous influence. Circling noises, bounces, rolling objects and unpredictable articulations: all the key elements of a landmark concrete work were there. Although produced according to the rules of the art – rules partly written by Dhomont himself – the piece perhaps had the defect of its qualities. All in all, it was a very academic presentation, in which the retrospective aspect of the work could be perceived as jumping from one cock to another. Nevertheless, hearing a new piece by Francis Dhomont is always a pleasure, as well as a real privilege.

Julie Delisle 

Is Pipa Aura Suichi a title heralding the use of the Chinese pipa? You’d think so. Yet it’s a sound bank uniquely conceived of composer Jean-François Laporte’s invented instruments that is the source of this work by Montreal composer and flutist Julie Delisle. Completely acousmatic, this piece hid its game well. It featured a variety of crackling sounds, which at times sounded wet, like a boiling movement. There was a marked use of sound treatments, often camouflaging the nature of the sounds used. Although the whole developed according to a relatively conventional structure and phrasing, the piece nevertheless had a depth of field created by its different textural layers evolving concomitantly.

Mourad Bncr

What will the earth’s environment sound like when there are no more humans? One thing is certain, no one will be there to hear it. That doesn’t mean, however, that our world will be all silence. In Le monde après nous, multimedia artist Mourad Bncr imagines such a soundscape. As soon as he took the stage, the room immediately fell into a gloomy atmosphere, where the music slowly evolved into an aesthetic at the crossroads of drone, dark ambient and glitch.  Apart from the artist’s presence as well as the distant inclusion of a hushed North African flute melody, Bncr’s music was a disembodied affair, subtracting the anthropocene from the portrait to leave breathing music behind. Subtle articulations had all the space needed for their movement to be fully felt by the audience. Very different from the other proposals, Le monde après nous was a highlight of the evening.

Guillaume Côté

With Guillaume Côté, we were venturing into territories once proscribed by the academic teaching of electroacoustics. Discrete Stream of Light was a long twenty-minute piece, structured with a handful of long rises in intensity, juxtaposed one after the other. During one of these movements, we were bathed in a superposition of consonant arpeggios echoing the great principles of minimalist aesthetics. There was then a gradual densification of sound strata, culminating in a peak and a brief fall. A new wave could then begin. Harmonically, the whole was very static. There was no deviation from the major mode in the choice of notes. What’s more, most of the material used seemed to consist of synthesized sounds. If the impression was far from that of innovative and surprising content, the familiarity of the musical result made Discrete Stream of Light a highly satisfying work in terms of affect. If there was a moment of aural bonbon at Akousma last night, it was definitely this one.

Roxanne Melissa Guerra-Lacasse

There’s sometimes a gap between the artists’ thematic inspirations and the perception we might have of the final works. In La Berceuse de la veuve by Roxanne Melissa Guerra-Lacasse, it’s love that should be the creative driving force. Yet it’s not easy to spot a concept so vague yet so omnipresent in art. The same applies to the play of the same name that inspired the work. What we could hear, however, was a very well put-together acousmatic piece, in which a variety of more or less identifiable sound sources woo and dance a round above our heads. The piece is loosely narrative, and the articulations are gradual. There’s a story being told through this rather ambient framework and its inverted sounds, but we don’t know what it is. The relationship with theater is certainly interesting, and we can expect this contribution to bear fruit in the long term in Guerra-Lacasse’s music. An artist whose work will be worth keeping an eye on.

Rocío Cano Valiño

The same applies to the work of Argentine composer Rocío Cano Valiño, whose two works presented at Akousma (Astérion; Okno) were based on stories by Jeorge Luis Borgès and Silvina Ocampo respectively. In Asterion, I couldn’t find either a labyrinth or a Minotaur. However, I did hear music that was totally engaging. In both pieces, the articulations were such that attention was held from beginning to end. Squeaks, rattles and rattling effects abounded, and every second was densely packed with sonic information. The saturation of sounds over-stimulated hearing, provoking both pleasure and tickling the ear. A monumental amount of micromontage was required to compose these constantly moving works. The aesthetics were consistent from one piece to the next, and the technical precision was remarkable. These broadcasts by Valiño were the highlights of the event.

Sarah Belle Reid

With Sarah Belle Reid, the trumpet was put in all its states. The Canadian composer was the only one to present a mixed work, Manifold fortrumpet and electronics. This 25-minute performance featured the composer herself, playing her instrument in a highly unorthodox manner. For most of the composition, the trumpet was used as an amplifier for Reid’s breath, which was then picked up by a microphone that interacted with the computer device in place. Thus, with various breathing effects and mouth noises, the composer used her instrument both as a sound source and as a controller. She also manipulated certain digital parameters via potentiometers, even leaving her trumpet aside to devote herself to her machines for a brief moment. Towards the end of the piece, a few brassy notes could be heard, intervening somewhat like a deliverance resolving a long moment of tension. But for the rest, the music was frantic, with the flow of the trumpet interventions in total, but controlled, chaos. The interplay between human and machine was spectacular, and this work concluded the evening on a high note.

Quelques jours plus tôt, à son quartier général de La Sala Rossa, le festival Phénoména accueillait un événement unique organisé par Arts in the Margins. Il est effectivement rare de recevoir la visite d’artistes venus d’Indonésie de notre côté de  l’océan. C’est pourtant trois fameux artistes de musique électronique expérimentale des îles de Java, Bali et Sumatra qui nous étaient présentés. Réunis sous la bannière du label javanais Yes No Wave Music, tout ce beau monde était en pleine tournée canadienne afin de présenter un bel échantillon de ce qui se fait de mieux dans l’archipel sud-est asiatique.

Wok the Rock

Le DJ Wok the Rock, fondateur du label Yes No Wave Music, avait la tâche de démarrer la soirée. Il a su réchauffer la salle, déjà bien remplie, en présentant des mix tout aussi intrigants qu’accrocheurs. En guise d’introduction, l’artiste échantillonnait la voix du chanteur Rully Shabara, connu pour son travail avec Senyawa, créant une atmosphère particulière alors que les mots en bahasa indonesia étaient répétés en un rythme saccadé. Un second échantillon de cette même voix allait d’ailleurs être entendu plus tard, à la fin de sa prestation. Entretemps, Wok the Rock travaillait avec des trames fort diversifiées, des tambours de hsaing waing birmans aux sonorités plus synthétiques. Sur le plan du rythme, la musique avançait souvent à deux vitesses, superposant des rythmes effrénés à une texture sonore plus lente et libre. Le tout progressait de temps à autre, ponctué par de surprenantes modulations rythmiques. Chose certaine, c’est qu’une partie de la foule semblait déjà être entrée dans une transe psychédélique, ce qui n’allait que s’amplifier au fil de la soirée.

Rani Jambak

Rani Jambak est une artiste sonore minangkabau, groupe ethnoculturel habitant la province de Sumatra du Nord. Toute sa démarche est axée sur l’écologie et la réutilisation des sons de son environnement naturel et culturel, dotant sa musique d’un univers sonore riche et unique. Afin de voyager léger, elle n’a malheureusement pas fait grâce à son public du Kincia Aia, instrument qu’elle a inventé et qui s’inspire des moulins à eau traditionnels. Plutôt, elle offrait une performance minimaliste avec ordinateur et microphone, assumant ici un côté dansant. Même son entrée en scène était faite dans les règles de l’art de la musique électronique, soit en prenant graduellement la place de Wok the Rock en mode back to back. Si tout était pulsé et très accessible, la musique de Jambak était également colorée par des environnements sonores urbains et forestiers inconnus du grand public. L’artiste possède également une voix remarquable, qu’elle a mise à profit en chantant de nombreuses pièces vocales. Il faut souligner l’excellence de l’exécution des lignes vocales, qui étaient non seulement parfaitement justes mais remplies d’expressivité, chose dont témoignaient également les mouvements corporels de Jambak. L’échange d’énergie constant entre l’artiste et son public aura fait de ce moment le clou de la soirée.

crédit photo Rani Jambak : Deanna Radford 

Gabber Modus Operandi

Résidants sur l’île de Bali, les deux artistes de Gabber Modus Operandi sont explicites quant à leur musique. Ils créent ensemble un gabber électronique rapide, agressif et psychédélique. Dès leur entrée sur scène, le volume des enceintes a considérablement augmenté et les rythmes insistants ont tout de suite entraîné la foule dans une frénésie collective. On se serait cru dans un rave, ou à l’une des Nocturnes du festival Mutek. D’ailleurs, on avait regretté l’annulation du duo indonésien lors de l’édition 2022 de ce festival. Voilà qui est rectifié.

Alors que la moitié du groupe gérait une station de DJ, le second musicien faisait surtout usage de sa voix. Il scandait, racontait et criait des paroles noyées de la réverbération et les effets, rien qui s’apparentait à du chant ordinairement conçu. Habillé à mi-chemin entre un militaire et un skieur, il enfilait également des gants sur lesquels étaient fixés des lasers verts. Ces faisceaux fluorescents ajoutaient grandement à l’éclairage et se promenaient librement dans la salle au gré des mouvements frénétiques du chanteur. À ces rythmes et ces voix qui semblaient incontrôlables, un choix personnalisé d’échantillons venait tapisser les trames, comme celle d’instruments de gamelan. La foule se souviendra également de l’imitation très approximative d’un kecak balinais que le groupe tentée en demandant au public de s’asseoir par terre. Vaguement futuriste, mais d’une intensité immédiate, Gabber Modus Operandi a su ameuter tout le monde grâce à son délire psychotrope.