Electric Spring 2016
Wed, 25 Nov 2015 14:47:00 GMT
The line up for Electric Spring 2016 is here! Come and enjoy five days of Sonic Exploration. Visit the website here for more information. And to book tickets go to our online store.
Wednesday 17 February - Marcelle Deschênes
Composer, pianist, teacher and multimedia artist born in Price (Québec) in 1939. Marcelle received her Master’s degree and doctoral courses in composition under Jean Papineau-Couture and Serge Garant at the Université de Montréal (1963-68), then followed that with advanced training and work at the Groupe de recherches musicales de l’ORTF with Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle and Guy Reibel, and at the Université de Paris VIII (1968-71).
She moved to Québec City (1972-77) where she worked as a lecturer and researcher in Auditory Perception, Musical Pedagogy for Children and Multi-art Animation Techniques at the Université Laval’s Studio de musique électroacoustique, and was a member of the electroacoustic performance group GIMEL.
Now back in Montréal, she is involved in the creation and operations of various organizations, as a founding member and director of: ACREQ (Association pour la création et la recherche électroacoustiques du Québec), Action multimédia (with the company Écran Humain), FATNA (Fondation pour l’application des technologies nouvelles aux arts), and Nexus (multimedia organization); and a founding member ofCEC (Canadian Electroacoustic Community ). She was also on the Board of Directors of the SMCQ (Société de musique contemporaine du Québec) for a few years.
| Marcelle Deschênes 1968 |
Thursday 18 February - Sébastien Roux
Sébastien Roux (born 1977) writes electronic music, and presents it in diverse formats, from CD's and records, to public listening sessions, sound installations, sound walks, and radio pieces.
In 2011 he began to develop an approach focused on principles of translation, analysing the structures of pre-existing art works (visual, musical, literary) and transposing them into into scores for new works (radiophonic or electro-acoustic taped music). This process has led to the creation of: Quatuor (2011) an electroacoustic work based on Beethoven's 10th String quartet, commissioned by Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and Nouvelle (2012), a radio work based on Flaubert's short story The Legend of Saint Julien L'Hospitalier, commissioned by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk. The most recent development of this process of “translation” is Inevitable Music which has involved an exhaustive research on the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, and a long-term examination and development of a methodology for applying the rules and means of these works to sonic ends.
Along with his solo works Roux maintains significant collaborations. With writer Célia Houdart he created sound walks car j’étais avec eux tout le temps (Festival d'Avignon 2010), and Dérive (Biennale Evento, Bordeaux 2009).They presented a multi-faceted project Oiseaux / Tonnerre at Marseille 2013 (European cultural capital) which combines a soundwalk on the mountain St Victoire, with a site-specific sound installation at a defunct coal mine in Gardanne, France. Another important collaboration is with designer and architect Olivier Vadrot, with whom he created the sound installations However (2009), Nikki (2013), and Wallpaper Music (2008), among others. Roux and Vadrot have been commissioned by the city of Belfort to re-think and design a comprehensive sound environment (including signal bells, public address, and library installation) for a middle school in Belfort, France. As a trio, Roux, Vadrot, and Houdart have created the radiophonic performance Paysages rectangles (Festival Entre Cours et Jardin, 2011) and the sound installations Précisions sur les vagues #2 (Festival d'Avignon, 2008) and La Veille.
Roux has written music for dance and theatre, for choreographers Lionel Hoche, Sylvain Prunenec, and DD Dorvillier, and theatre director Annie Dorsen.
Friday 19 February - Flora Köneman
Flora Könemann collects fragments, puts everything in a blender, and presses start. Influences: a lot of tape players and typewriters, brainwave-noise, input, output, electronic high voltage circuits, voice-noise, wOrds_sdrOw, fuck off², screamo, echo, reverb, distortion, loops, structural disorder, swedish nightmares, liminal fantasies and fictional dating. She received her BA in Cultural and Social Sciences from Viadrina University Frankfurt (Oder), and her MFA in C:Art:Media from Valand School of Fine Arts in Göteborg, Sweden.
Saturday 20 February - Diemo Schwarz
Diemo Schwarz presents "Playing the Sound Space", where composition is an explorative navigation of sound events with CataRT, morphing them into new rhythmic and timbral structures, simultaneously proposing novel combinations and evolutions of the source material. Through his programme, Chris Mercer combines gritty lo-tech and shimmering hi-tech in a set featuring custom instruments, found objexts, multiple iPads and a virtual orchestra made in real-time from a live violinist.
Sunday 21 February - BEAST
BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) is the concert sound system of the University of Birmingham’s Electroacoustic Music Studios. Founded in 1982 by Jonty Harrison, since 2014 BEAST has been under the direction of Scott Wilson, along with Annie Mahtani and James Carpenter as technical director. Over the decades since its launch BEAST has become established as one of the leading systems for the presentation of electronic music in the world, and as an ongoing catalyst for creation and innovation in the field. BEAST is particularly recognised for its key role in championing the development of acousmatic music – music composed especially for loudspeakers – and live ‘diffusion’, a practice aimed at creating immersive sonic experiences in concert. While continuing to advance creative work in these areas, BEAST is also a platform for a wide variety of sound-based art in various styles and genres, including live electronic music, pieces combining instruments and electronic sound, soundscape composition/phonology, and sound installations.
BEAST has performed extensively in the UK and other parts of Europe, including at London’s South Bank Centre, the Edinburgh and Huddersfield Festivals, the Henry Wood Hall in Glasgow, MultiMediale II in Karlsruhe, The Royal Dutch Conservatory in The Hague, The Acousmatic Experience in Amsterdam, the Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, the Inventionen Festival in Berlin, the Echt-Zeit Festival in Basel, Aix en Musique in Aix en Provence, and the Sound Around Festival in Copenhagen. Closer to home BEAST’s activities have included regular contributions in The Series at the CBSO Centre as part of our collaboration with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. In 2012 BEAST began holding concerts in its new home, the bespoke designed Elgar Concert Hall at the Bramall Music Building, arguably one of the best venues of its size for the presentation of electronic music in UK and elsewhere.
