Semaine du Neuf | Martin Bédard’s “archaeosonic” excavations

The electroacousticians present at the Maison de la culture Marcel-Robidas in Longueuil agreed on Monday that this was the first acousmatic concert presented in this municipality: composer Martin Bédard, a Longueuil resident for 8 years, was the curator and main artist, supported by his colleagues Pauline Patie, Louis Dufort and Antoine Lussier. Acousmatics is a practice consisting of presenting electronic works without any complements or other stage reinforcements but rather using an acousmonium, an orchestra of 22 top-level loudspeakers arranged around the audience.

Excellent program! Martin Bédard’s talent deserves a broad spotlight here. On Monday, he presented three pieces from his repertoire, composed at different periods in his career. Champ de fosses (Field of Excavations), 2008, his first work, is based primarily on a drone around which a frequency chord is constructed. This work was constructed from a collection of anecdotal sounds from the sounds that surrounded him at the time, composed in the context of the 400th anniversary of Quebec City. These are not just superpositions of notes, but also of textures and sporadic interventions of more abrupt effects, the creaking of trains on the rails, hammering, beating of wings, and other hissing sounds, in short a work that is part of the long furrow of this concrete music initiated by Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) during the 1940s, nevertheless updated in the manner of Martin Bédard.

Our first instincts as listeners might lead us to associate this work with the soundtrack of a film noir or a science fiction film, since most of us have identified it that way, due to not listening to it under the optimal conditions of an acousmonium. This would be a mistake, even a sinking into cinematic cliché, because this Excavation Field is rich in twists and turns, clearly autonomous when you pay close attention. Which inspires my in-house neologism: archaeosonic… excuse me. The next work, Replica, involves Martin Bédard and flautist/composer Marie-Hélène Breault, drawn from Bédard’s “utopian instrumental” period, a work made essentially of flute recordings taken from Breault’s recordings and improvisations, then filtered, processed, reconstructed, reorganized, reproduced differently, mise en abyme… “a piece that folds back on itself in a world of utopian, essentially flutistic instruments.”

An authentic labour of conjugal love (since it is likely about a couple in real life), Replica is another convincing version of this imaginary. It was clear that the second work was a genuine formal continuity of what we had heard before. Martin Bédard’s dramaturgy effectively involves comparable contrasts with different materials and this with an even greater fluidity, proof of formal maturity.

Artistic director of the Akousma festival and a staunch nature lover (having often discussed the subject with him), the piece Monts Valin evokes this mountain range located in the northern part of the Saguenay region. Ambient in style, this linear framework is an augmented diffraction of sounds gathered from nature, forest and aquatic sounds carried by a thick harmonic framework that achieves a certain power and eventually thins out with slight modulations. Very Zen, as Martin Bédard announced at the outset. Pauline Patie, a French composer living in Montreal, follows with the spatialization of Surtitré, a work clearly linked to musique concrète and its recent updates. A series of oversized effects, rather harshly exposed, noise organized like a succession of meticulously constructed tensions and releases. The hamster that then roams the brain suggests the sublimation of a visit to the engine room. A very rigorous, integrated collage of sounds, perhaps a tad generic for those who superficially absorb such an approach to avoidance, circumvention, and parenthesis, to quote the host’s comment. Further listening will certainly reveal more about the style of Pauline Patie, a name to remember.

Antoine Lussier, for his part, chose to transform, even reconstruct, in real time the materials of Choose Wisely, a more ethereal piece despite its sometimes violent jolts. It’s difficult for ordinary people to separate the virtues of real-time intervention from the studio composition work, but hey, there was definitely substance there. Honey, the longest piece on the program (17:26), intended as a conclusion, “starts from something volatile… the pollen densifies, transforms to reach a liquid state with a powerful taste, a principle of model density and also a loving metaphor dedicated to my girlfriend and my daughter.” Here again, we observe an evolution in Martin Bédard’s approach. The noisy and post-industrial dimensions are brilliantly exposed. We find ourselves in a high-tech workshop, a robotic assembly line, a construction site, the sounds evoke frenetic activities of human production to which we give elements of composition, all involving various immaterial sound architectures and other resonant invisibilities, to borrow the title of this busy and conclusive program.

PROGRAMME

Martin Bédard: Champs de fouilles  (Acousmatique) – 10’40
Marie-Hélène Breault & Martin Bédard: Replica (Acousmatique) – 14’42
Louis Dufort: Monts Valin (Acousmatique) – 11’37

Pauline Patie: Surtitré  (Acousmatique) – 10’17

Antoine Lussier: Choose Wwisely (Performance) – 11’21
Martin Bédard: Honey (Architectures from silence no.1)  (Acousmatique) – 17’26