TOO REAL / FEELS FAKE (2022) performed by l'Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), Véronique Lacroix 

TOO REAL / FEELS FAKE is an examination of the uncanny space between ‘real’ and simulated sounds and spaces. Traversing between instrumental, environmental, and synthetic sounds, the work renders homage to the nostalgic and beautiful quality of things that are ‘not quite right.’ Drawn from the ‘classic’ synthesized sounds of simple oscillators and vintage drum machines, vocal synthesis, general MIDI samples, field recordings, and manipulated media samples (including recordings of a reel-to-reel film projector and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s spoken line “realer than real” from the David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ (1999)), the work is an expression of the poetry of the hyperreal, where instruments imitate sounds that were meant to imitate instruments. Most of all, it is a tribute to the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal and their director Véronique Lacroix, who commissioned the work. I wanted to create a work that would be fun and virtuosic, allowing for the musicians to explore many different sides of their expression, filtered through excess and saturation.

Trailer for ÉCHO, a new film by renowned choreographer Édouard Lock with dancer Rachele Buriassi, and my work «Alone and unalone» as its score, interpreted by Ensemble Paramirabo

IMMATERIAL HOW (2021)
for Proxima Centauri (Bordeaux), HANATSUmiroir (Strasbourg), and Ensemble Paramirabo (Montréal).

IMMATERIAL HOW is about idealism. A multimedia work in three movements, the piece is scored for 13 instruments, electronics, and video. Part 1, an audioguide for heterotrophs, frames the biological condition of requiring nutrition from external sources as the subject of an imaginary retrofuturistic outdoor museum (filmed primarily in Montréal’s Parc Frédéric-Back, a former landfill now used to extract biogas). Heterotrophy is a conceptual seed for the piece that is used as a metaphor to examine the tension between individual and collective needs, and the desire for an idealized balance between them. 

IMMATERIAL HOW responds to the cultural-philosophical frame of German Idealism, and the way it deeply interweaves with the history of Classical Music. The movement’s closing material references Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, whose setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy is often associated with global human unity (not least in its adoption as the official anthem of the European Union). 

Part 2, Ein Hungerkünstler (a hunger artist) is named both after Franz Kafka’s short story of the same name and Lee Bul’s sculpture in homage to the former work. This movement examines the relationship between the cultural valorization of suffering and human ideation. It charts a path through Christian and Classical Greek imagery, radical 60s-70s performance artworks including Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Chris Burden’s Shoot, Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, and the toxic dehumanization of Idols in celebrity culture, with reference to the FreeBritney movement surrounding the highly publicized life of Britney Spears. Ein Hungerkünstler also responds to the idea of Dualism, or the ‘mind/body’ split — and the relationship between this idea and body dysmorphia, self-destruction, and the creation of idealized virtual selves.The work draws inspiration from and makes reference to a vast collection of artworks, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Britney Spears’ Toxic, Andy Warhol’s Eating a Hamburger, John Waters’ Female Trouble, SOPHIE’s Immaterial, and Sunloverz’ Shine On (Heiko and Maiko’s Gute Laune remix), Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score to AKIRA, Michaelangelo’s David, and the Venus de Milo. Many of the images in the work are processed with Google’s Deep Dream tool. 

Part 3, the germ of compassion is the heart of benevolence, is titled after a quote from the philosopher Mencius. The quote continues: “the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. One has these four germs just as they have four limbs. For one possessing these four germs to deny their own potentialities is for them to cripple themselves.” This movement, featuring footage of plant-care (performed by Gabriella Garcia) attempts to recenter after the widening of tensions in second movement. A return to the real from the ideal, the piece attempts to find calm and balance in flow and care, in accepting the material now.

IMMATERIAL HOW was commissioned by Proxima Centauri, Hanatsu Miroir, and Ensemble Paramirabo, with assistance from the Artistic Office of the New Aquitaine Region (OARA) and the Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music (SACEM).

“Outhere” for quartet and offstage electronics, commissioned and premiered by UltraViolet Ensemble

In an archipelago - for Standing Wave. Recording and Interactive APP!

In an archipelago is a work for sextet and electronics, or any combination of its constituent parts, from solos, various possible duos and trios, and so on, all the way up to the full band, for a total of 127 possible combinations. The work was composed during the
COVID-19 pandemic, where an uncertain future led to the idea of affording the extracting of solos from the commission of a chamber piece-to-be. Each instrument’s part was composed one-by-one, first as a mockup assembled from recordings of my past pieces, among other sources. I listened to each of these parts in different combinations and fine-tuned them as I went in order to compose in such a way that they could exist on their own or in this variable company. I then transcribed the parts into a notated chamber score.
Each instrument has a phoneme attached to it, drawn from the title, and the title of each performance becomes an assemblage of its parts.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s 1985 essay The Repeating Island set out a way of thinking borne of the postcolonial conditions of the Caribbean that challenges the binary ontologies of Analytical and Continental Thinking. An Archipelagic Thinking is one of multiplicity and polyrhythm which conceptualizes through fragmentary interrelations rather than a system or a totality. In composing this piece, I was thinking about
connectivity through isolation, and the idea that repetition brings necessarily a difference and a deferral. The kind of densely modular repetition I experiment with, where every moment is densely recontextualizable, is one that I hope offers an opportunity to collapse
binary listening.

In an archipelago was commissioned by Standing Wave.

Listen to the work as an interactive app, creating your own mix of the different instruments in any combination!
iOS:
apps.apple.com/us/app/standing-wave/id1601878153
Android:
play.google.com/store/apps/detail…edia.StandingWave

A bilateral, a symmetry for John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Orchestra

A bilateral, a symmetry is a reaction to the problems posed by dialectical and binary thinking, and shares an expression of fluidity, instability, and in-betweens that resists the impulse of encyclopedic categorization. It was created by manipulating recordings of improvisations and notated fragments by 8 of Vancouver’s most daring musicians. The video is created from an assembly of turn-of-the-century biological illustrations (most notably those of Ernst Haeckel), scans of Jacques Derrida’s annotated copy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, as well as footage from the Gulf Islands of BC.

KNOWNS defamiliarizes the everyday object of the chair, framing it as a sounding instrument. The piece looks at the fragility and tension of the plurality of meanings that chairs can convey, and acts as a kind of ode to the enormous weight of associations the objects sometimes carry for us. Chairs are places where we work, where we rest, where we gather together, or set ourselves apart. They can give us comfort, authority, welcome, or take these things away from us. Empty chairs can mean different things to us than when they are sat on. So much of these things have to do with the contexts we give the chairs, but when we listen to the objects themselves, we can discover new things about them and see new beauty in them, and open ourselves up to other associations. KNOWNS is a site for all of these possible associations. Particular inspirations of mine included Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art work One and Three Chairs (1965), Åke Parmerud’s electroacoustic work Les objets obscures (1991), and The Backstreet Boys’ choreography for As Long As You Love Me (1997). KNOWNS was created by assembling video improvisations of performances with an amplified wooden chair at the Woodside church in Troy, New York, courtesy of a curatorial residency offered by Gabriella Garcia. The multitudinous sounds offered by the chair are expanded, made hyper-real, or estranged, through electronic manipulation. The work was created for the 2021 Wonderhorse festival in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Full concert of Novarumori with Innovations en concert, Isak Golschneider conducting, and Émilie Girard-Charest as soloist, including the premiere of my piece “New work, collapsing, new work.”

New work, collapsing, new work is about rapid cycles of creation and destruction. In everything there are beginnings, and endings, and sometimes experiencing something begin and end quickly can create a feeling of timelessness, or the kind of whiplash effect of rapidly-experienced strong emotions like love or grief.The piece emerges from silence several times, accumulating in sound masses of electrical hums and harmonies built outward from the open strings of the instruments. It examines ‘breaking points’ through bursts of energy, letting loose ‘new sounds’ that are nonetheless evocative of the past. The piece acts as a kind of nostalgic, retrofuturistic love-letter for the quickly-waning novelty of avant-garde art movements and music technology. It pays homage to 90s digital synthesis, acousmatic-like gestures, ‘dated’ electronic music effects like ring modulation. Seeded in the name of the genre of New Music itself is the kind of paradox ‘newness’ faces as a temporal phenomenon.
The title is at once a tongue-in-cheek homage to the temporary title ‘New Work’ often given to pieces before their completion, and the German Industrial Music group Einstürzende Neubauten (“Collapsing New Buildings” - especially in reference to the quickly-constructed Neubauten created during the GDR). The electronics contain a brief manipulated sample of their track ‘Ende Neu’ from the 1996 album of the same name.The piece features two improvising soloists (Émilie Girard-Charest and Stéphane Diamantakiou)  who are each offered moments to respond to the preceding section of music, offering an individual personalized ‘last word’ to the end of a creation-destruction cycle.New Work, Collapsing, New Work was commissioned by Innovations en concert and created for Novarumori with Isak Goldschneider conducting.