((audience)) on-air is a 9-day radio festival, to be held in conjunction with the premiere of the ((audience)) festival at the Red House Art Center.
((audience)) on-air will begin with Simulcast 2.1, a rebroadcast of the works in Simulcast 2.0, curated by Emmanuel Madan.
Simulcast 2.1 will be on-air from midnight until 4am, each Saturday and Sunday night of the ((audience)) festival.
9/19-9/20 (Saturday Night): Hélène Prévost
9/20-9/21 (Sunday Night): i8u
9/26-9/27 (Saturday Night): Mario Gauthier
9/27-9-28 (Sunday Night): Stéphane Claude
SIMULCAST 2.0 : Sackville was a radio art series that aired in summer 2009 on the community radio station CHMA 106.9 FM in Sackville, New Brunswick. Curated by Emmanuel Madan, the project was presented by the Silophone organization in association with the Ok.Quoi?! Arts Festival (Sackville, NB) and with free103point9.
Curator’s Statement
As late-night radio listeners well know, unusual things can happen on the radio after midnight. There is something about the solitude of night-time listening which brings out radio’s best and most original attributes. The densely-packed conventions of daytime programming are loosened, and can at times even fall away entirely. This second edition of SIMULCAST taps into these possibilities, asking the question: what if time – and specifically time on the radio – were to stand still, even for a just a few hours? The answers Prévost, Gauthier, i8u and Claude offer to the question are rich and diverse. Using a variety of strategies and techniques, their inhabitations of the airwaves over twenty eight nights are not only works of audio art or radio art, but interrogations about what it means to take one’s time.
Emmanuel Madan, July 2009
9/19-9/20 (Saturday Night)
Hélène Prévost – “12:00″
A radio in the night.
An unending flow, emanating from nowhere, ebbing, subsiding, leading nowhere.
An electrical pendulum pulsates, demarcating the radio’s crackle into even slices, occasionally letting drop small crumbs of sound, brief moments of electrical
tumbling over the airwaves as a walker might trip on a rock. A walk at night on an electrical cable plugged into the wall.
Sound artist, musician and radio producer, Hélène Prévost was responsible for two important radio shows devoted to new music, musique actuelle, free improv, electronic and experimental music and sound art, with a particular interest in new technologies and their application to music : Musique Actuelle and Le Navire Night, heard on Radio-Canada between 1978 and 2007. She coordinated the Canadian public broadcaster’s artistic participation in several major music festivals, including New Music America, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville and MUTEK, as well as participating in a number of events which placed the radio in unconventional situations, such as the Harbor Symphonies of Montréal, the Silophone project with [The User], Promethee Numerique (WDR) and many studio, radio and web projects.
Parallel to her radio career, she has pursued a personal practice of sound exploration, through field recordings, editing and mixing. Since 2006 she has participated in many live performances and CD projects such as Montreal Sound Matter and Victoriaville Sound Matter, Rencontres de Musiques Spontanées, l’Art des Bruits (hommage to Luigi Russolo), 60 ans d’électro, les Jeudis Tout ouïe, HMMM remix, Ladies club, vol 2, and has contributed articles to Musicworks, Artexte, Esse, and Circuit.
9/20-9/21 (Sunday Night)
i8u – “still life”
In composing “still life,” I recalled a fascinating experience during a recent stay on the Frioul archipelago, near Marseilles. While walking and recording sounds for various projects, I noticed a snail on the steps leading to my studio. Every day I walked up and down those steps; I was constantly excited at the prospect of observing the progress this snail would manage. It was very cold and it looked to me as if the snail wasn’t moving at all. My enjoyment of the snail was the surreal concept that I could not observe its immediate progress but was aware of it by gauging how much progress it had made each day. This project being in line with the minimal aesthetic I am interested in of late, I have decided to approach the sound of imperceptible change as an audio “still life.”
France Jobin aka i8u (b. 1958) is a sound / installation / web artist residing in Montreal, Canada. i8u’s audio art can be qualified as “sound sculpture”. It reveals powerful, opaque and complex sound environments where analog and digital meet. Her installation/web art can be said to follow a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements.
i8u has created recordings for bake/staalplaat (Netherlands), ROOM40 (Australia), nvo (Austria), Mutek (Canada), bremsstrahlung (USA). She has collaborated with Goem, Martin Tétreault, David Kristian and most recently, her work with Tomas Phillips “ligne”, was released on ATAK in Japan.
She has participated in various music and new technology festivals in Canada, Europe and the United States, notably Mutek (Montreal) Le Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Ver Uit de Maat (Rotterdam) SEND + RECEIVE (Winnipeg), Club Transmediale (Berlin), V’elak (Vienna), Shut up and Listen (Vienna), Restless Brilliance and the LISTEN/VISION series.
i8u’s web work/installations have been shown at Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Toronto’s Images film festival and at MIVEAM 06. The AIR program in Krems Austria enabled her to create “und transit”, a sound installation set in the cloister of MinoritenKirche in Stein, Austria.
Her work continues to evolve as technologies enable her to create in new environments.
www.i8u.com
9/26-9/27 (Saturday Night):
Mario Gauthier – “Passages” (from the series “Transparencies”)
Transparences” is a series of pieces inspired by a single idea: that despite appearances and regardless of context, nothing is ever completely immobile. This idea is explored in six different ways, in each case starting from a “single” sound which is transformed using a variety of techniques: highlighting the interplay between resonance and silence with two notes on the piano and occasional ornaments (La tierce); shifting depths of field in a certain type of “silence” (Ombres); disproportionate resonance of a sound source (Cordes); fluctuations of a complex electronic sound (Itérations) ; modulation of a repetitive acoustic sound (Tempus fugis), resonance and rhythm in a complex sound source (Passages).
The results are to be heard and to be listened to, but the true comprehension of what these explorations reveal can only be gained over a sustained time. For even though each of these pieces is derived from a single sound, that sound is itself not neutral. It is always accompanied, augmented, or contaminated: a ray of night, an accidental incursion, the listening environment, the effect on the listener, etc.
Paul Valéry writes that “While there is conscious variation of thought, no variation of reality,” (Notebook I, p. 256) but the opposite is also true.
In 1985, after having founded the concert society, Société de concerts alteratifs du Québec (now Codes d’accès), Mario Gauthier became a researcher, then a producer at Radio Canada’s Chaîne culturelle. During his eighteen-year tenure there (1988 to 2004) he produced numerous daily and weekly programs, “concept” programs and “broadcast projects” with very specific and specialized content. All the while, he devoted great energy to the field of audio art, creation, and new music through programs such as Chants magnétiques (1992-1995), Le Navire Night (1995-1996), and L’espace du son (1996-2001). He recorded over 300 concerts of electroacoustic and new music and commissioned some thirty original radio works. Some of these productions are now available in CD form. Others have received honors from Radio-Canada’s Prix de la radio, the Community of French-language Public Radios’ GILSON competition, and the European Broadcasting Union’s ITALIA prize. In 2000, he was awarded the Conseil québécois de la musique’s Opus prize for the creativity and originality of his work.He has participated in many international music juries in Québec, Austria, France, and Poland. He lectures frequently on such topics as audio art, radio, cinema, phonography, and the relationship between visual art and sound.
In 2002, he returned to his first loves: audio art, research, and artistic collaborations. He is a member of the improv collective THERESA TRANSISTOR, has worked with Magali Babin (hydrophone project, 2007-2008), with Éric Normand and Mini-Bloc (improvised music concert in Rimouski, 2007), with the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (as historian of audio art and electroacoustic music), with Eric Mattson (presenting a lecture during the event “Je me souviens” in Montréal, 2008), with Hélène Prévost and Erik d’Orion (multi-radio concert “60 ans d’électro” organized by Réseaux des arts médiatiques, 2008).
He is currently active in audio heritage conversation projects, both for the Phonothèque québécoise and with the private collection of Mme Maryvonne Kendergi. He has received grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. He is currently composing a radio work about the voice and writing a book on the effects of sound recording and reproduction on perception.
http://www.smcq.qc.ca/smcq/fr/artistes/g/gauthier_ma/
http://www.reseauxconcerts.com/fr/artistes/gauthier_ma/
9/27-9-28 (Sunday Night):
Stephane Claude – Waves Array
“Waves Array” is a four hour real-time recording session / performance, a sound piece for the airwaves.
It combines a Blumlein stereo recording of an empty room with real-time sound synthesis and short-wave manipulations. These wave elements, living on their own and colliding with one another, are mixed and assembled into a vertical compositional structure with minimal intervention on the part of the composer.
Stéphane Claude is an electronic/electroacoustic musician and audio mastering engineer. His research is concerned with providing a conceptual framework for audio recordings and he also makes sound installations. He has produced soundtracks for various image, theatre and multimedia projects by other artists. Since 1992, he has been preoccupied with the presentation of electronic art, by favoring the notion of ‘active listening.’ As an audio consultant, he has participated in the conception, production and integration of high-end surround sound and digital recording and mastering studios in Montreal and abroad. He is cofounder, with artist Gisèle Trudel, of the artistic research cell Æ whose research and works have been presented internationally.
www.aelab.com
Tune in at redhouseartradio.org
