Eve Egoyan / Mauricio Pauly – Hopeful Monster

Hopeful Monster is certainly not for everyone, let’s be honest. Suggest it to your brother-in-law who finds Shostakovich bizarre and you’ll have the immense pleasure of seeing him scurry off without a second thought (assuming you want that outcome, of course….). Nevertheless, for all of us who love to plunge into a whirlwind of surprises and bewilderment, this is a real masterpiece! 

Eve Egoyan is a pianist specialising in contemporary music and Mauricio Pauly, is an experimental electronic and electroacoustic artist and composer. Here, Egoyan, accustomed to an acoustic piano pushed to the limit, crosses a new frontier by presenting her “augmented piano”. Unlike the familiar prepared piano, the augmented piano is a kind of pianistic cyborg in which the acoustic instrument is linked to a whole range of electronics enabling the artist to control live (in realtime) all the manipulations – some would say tortures – inflicted on the sounds produced by her playing. Stretches, distortions, microtonal shifts, etc., anything is possible.

Eve Egoyan and Mauricio Pauly will be giving Hopeful Monster a Canadian tour in the coming weeks, including a concert in Montreal on 13 November as part of No Hay Banda’s 2023-2024 season.

Accompanied by Mauricio Pauly and his palette of sound objects and electronic lutherie, the two Canadians perform a dozen or so textural and musical improvisations that plunge the listener into a totally exoplanetary universe. While the dazzling flashes, asperities, undulations, ululations, splinters, scratches and shrivels of sound are unleashed without warning, the whole programme remains framed within a logical, controlled structural process. From the first piece to the last, we follow a path that moves from totally dispersed, nervous and chaotic atmospheres to an evocative, soaring, more acoustic central resting place. The last part is like a more rigorous, almost written synthesis.

Whether you like the avant-garde or not, you can’t fail to be impressed by the range of transformational sonic possibilities that the ‘augmented’ device makes possible. Like John Cage’s prepared piano, Eve Egoyan’s augmented piano could well become a new standard in contemporary music.