France Jobin + Richard Chartier, visual by Markus Heckmann
Canada, /USA / DE
1001 odyssey
DUO AV @Bunker | 11.03 SUN, 21:00-22:00
‘DUO’ is the first project of minimalist composers France Jobin and Richard Chartier. DUO expresses eternity and creates an atmosphere that fills space. The sound they produce permeates into a complex and delicate system depicted in time and space. The sound of DUO, together with Markus Heckmann’s beautiful visual work, guides the audience into a world of mysterious emotions and experiences as if it is a spacewalk.
Jobin is a French Montreal based sound / installer / artist, composer and curator. Her audio art, which can be called ‘sound-sculpture’, shows a minimalist approach to a complex sound environment where analog and digital intersect.
Richard Chartier is considered one of Los Angeles-based composers and key figures in minimalist sound art. His work explores the interrelationship between the spatial characteristics of sound and silence.
Markus Heckmann, technical director of touch designer software developer Derivative, has long been an expert in creating large installations and visual arts, working with artists and large projects with inspiration for music, lighting and club scene images.
Bucheon Art Bunker B39 14449, Bucheon Art BunkerB39, 53 Samjak-ro Bucheon-si, Gyeonggi-do Republic of Korea
France Jobin headlines tomorrow on Saturday 9/7 at 4PM at North Door – we hope to see you! // don’t forget to get $7 off individual tickets for Sep. 7 + Sep. 8 using promo code INTERFERE2019 through Eventbrite #interferencefestwomenmakingnoise2019
So excited to see you all at Interference Fest-Women Making Noise 2018- between 2pm-5pm TODAY at North Door, 501 Brushy Street today. We start the day off at 2pm with Winol Tripantu playing a set, then a poetry recitation by critically acclaimed poet Chaitali Sen, followed by Houstonion musician and improvisor Megan Easely, San Antonio’s premier performance artist, Christie Blizard, then France Jobin at 4pm who is coming fresh to us from Mutek this past week!!! Yes!!
A/Visions 3 August 24, 2019, 19:00 – 21:00 DUO – World premiere: 19:00 – 19:45
At MUTEK, Jobin and Chartier present the world premiere of audiovisual project DUO, with synchronized visuals created by visual artist and TouchDesigner’s technical director and artist Markus Heckmann
Ambient sounds intermingle within an intricate and delicate spatial and temporal-meets-“intemporelle“ system in DUO, the first collaborative project from artists France Jobin and Richard Chartier. Originally released on the Tokyo-based mAtter label, DUO reverberates with tension, an ominous suspense building throughout five long tracks composed of static electrical signals, multi-level drones and serene synth melodies.
Both prolific artists with a focus on audiovisual environments, new technologies and modular components, France Jobin and Richard Chartier met at MUTEK Montréal in 2000 and went on to form a collaborative friendship and professional kinship. The sounds of everyday life become sculptural and enveloping in the multidisciplinary work of award-winning artist, composer and curator France Jobin. Since the mid-’90s, she’s crafted meticulous compositions that merge analog rumblings with digital precision, modular with field recordings, musical with visual. Applying a minimalist approach to her site-specific sound environments, she creates installations and performances inspired by the architecture of physical spaces, deeply immersing listeners in subtly textured variations, often inducing physical effects that go beyond the ear.
Alongside his visual art practice, Richard Chartier has produced multiple minimal electronic pieces, exploring the interrelations between the natural spatiality of sound, silence, focus, perception and the art of listening itself. He’s collaborated with composer William Basinski, sound artists ELEH, CoH, Matmos, German electronic music pioneer Asmus Tietchens and many more sound and multimedia artists. Chartierʼs sound works/installations have been presented in museums, galleries and performance contexts all over the world.
After the release of DUO on mAtter label, Jobin and Chartier created an exhibition of prints based on the concept, re.DUO, held in February at Tokyo’s gift_lab GARAGE gallery. Jobin and Chartier premiere DUO‘s first-ever live performance at MUTEK, combining sound with seamless live visuals by artist Markus Heckmann to create a wholly immersive and spatially dynamic atmosphere.
La Vitrola – 4602 St. Laurent, Montreal, Quebec H2T 1R3
die ANGEL est un projet d’improvisation noise et électro-acoustique fondé en 1999 par Dirk Dresselhaus et Ilpo Väisänen (ex Pan sonic). Leur dernier album, Yön Magneetti Sine, a été enregistré dans l’environnement calme du chalet de Väisänen près de Karttula, en Finlande. Chacune des cinq pistes improvisées fait écho aux vibrations qui y ont été ressenties durant ces nuits d’été lumineuses.
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die ANGEL is an improvisational noise and electro-acoustic project founded in 1999 by Dirk Dresselhaus and Ilpo Väisänen (ex-Pan sonic). Their most recent album, Yön Magneetti Sine, was recorded in the calm of Väisänen’s cottage near Karttula, Finland. Each of the five improvised tracks echo the vibrations experienced during the white nights of summer.
L’objectif principal du groupe international de performance multimédia et de musique XAMBUCA est de créer des environnements audiovisuels dans lesquels coexistent des réalités différentes. Créé par l’artiste sonore Chandra Shukla, et incluant désormais l’artiste visuel Geo Lynx, le groupe expérimente avec l’espace, le son, les interactions visuelles entre humains et parfois même la danse, donnant lieu à des morceaux qui ont des airs de mouvements synchronisés.
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International multimedia/music performance group XAMBUCA’s sole objective is to create audio-visual environments in which alternate realities reside. Created by sound artist Chandra Shukla and now involving visual artist Geo Lynx, the group experiments with space, sound, visuals human interaction and sometimes even dance that result in pieces as whole, synchronized movements.
France Jobin est une artiste d’installation et sonore, compositrice et conservatrice établie à Montréal. Son art audio a été décrit comme sculpture sonore, informé par une approche minimaliste aux environnements sonores complexes dans lesquels l’analogue et le numérique se rencontrent. Ses installations offrent une voie parallèle, incorporant des éléments musicaux et visuels inspirés par l’architecture de certains espaces physiques.
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France Jobin is a sound / installation / artist, composer and curator residing in Montreal. Her audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”, revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital intersect. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces.
La Vitrola se situe malheureusement au 2ème étage (il y a 41 marches au total). Les toilettes sont de genre neutre et ne sont pas accessibles aux fauteuils roulants. Toute personne désirant une assistance pour accéder à notre salle peut nous contacter. C’est avec plaisir que nous tenterons de répondre au mieux à ses besoins.
La Vitrola is unfortunately located on the 2nd floor (41 steps total). There are gender neutral washrooms which are not wheelchair accessible. Anyone needing assistance accessing our space can contact us as we are more than happy to try and accommodate people to the best of our ability.
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Le Suoni Per Il Popolo reconnaît que le territoire sur lequel nous sommes rassemblé.e.s est le territoire traditionnel et non-cédé du peuple Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk), un lieu qui a longtemps constitué un site de rencontre et d’échange entre plusieurs nations.
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Suoni Per Il Popolo would like to acknowledge that the land on which we gather is the traditional and unceded territory of the kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk), a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst nations.
“I transform, manipulate and recycle sounds of everyday life to represent them in a new light.”
As the evolution of electronic music continues to accelerate at a pace far quicker than what we most likely realise, it’s not uncommon to learn of new and inquisitive ways that producers are breaking ground in developing their sound, wherever it may come from. Once Scandic doom and metal artists can now be heard basking in the deeper often darker echelons of dub and drone, while those with punk origins can find themselves embracing the industrial, even disco, and EBM edge of dance music. Closer to the dancefloor still is jungle, breaks and UK bass culture that’s seeped its way into the BPMs of house and techno. Nothing is off limits.
For Canadian minimalist composer and installation artist France Jobin, her place within electronic music is ambient. For the past 20 years, Jobin has created works in the rich realms of this multifaceted genre and produced music under both her own name and the moniker i8u for a wide-ranging arc of explorative labels such as Line, Baskaru, ROOM40, and Murmur Records. With her music and installation work exploring all matter of elemental themes and surround sound concepts too, Jobin’s work, either live or static, has appeared in formal and unconventional spaces the world over; be it on stage for Montreal’s Mutek, Berlin’s Club Transmediale or Museolaboratorio in Citta’ Sant’Angelo, to her architectural installations at master classes at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the EMPAC Concert Hall in Troy, New York.
As technology accelerates so does its power to enhance the music making process, and Jobin, exploring these fields, peaks and dimensions, sees her own productions – full of lush tones, modular algorithms and binary coding – sitting deep within a macrocosm of ambient academia and sound art.
“I use field recordings that I manipulate using only plugins that come with the software…a minimal aesthetic in the larger sense of the word. The manner in which I will be able to transform and manipulate sounds will inform my process of composing for either an album, sound installation or a live performance and exploring new software is always interesting because it sends one down a different path. Dialling through Bitwig’s resonator banks, reverb, blur effects and frequency shifters, to distortion presets and the system’s modulation abilities, the thing that jumped out at me are the subtleties I am able to achieve while processing field recordings.” Jobin’s research into field recording and its manipulation, she says, is finding new interpretation through how Bitwigs plug-ins can be stacked; adjusting their parameters to work independently or in chain reaction of each other. “The nestled device chains have a great impact on this,” she says. “The way in which the panels are connected and the access to the arrange and mix view,” Jobin adds, “provides me with a direct connection in order to transpose my ideas-concepts into a viable sketch.”
“Dialling through Bitwig’s resonator banks, reverb, blur effects and frequency shifters, to distortion presets and the system’s modulation abilities, the thing that jumped out at me are the subtleties I am able to achieve while processing field recordings.”
Drawing attention to this kind of detail lends extra attention to her most recent album, released via Atom™ & Material Object’s No.Ware label, called Intrication. Look up the word and you’ll be led to what the internet defines as quantum entanglement: “a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity.” Expressing ideas, concepts and feelings in the most direct manner is part of the process, Jobin explains, when producing, and “in that sense,” she says, “Bitwig will facilitate my ability to translate abstract concepts to a blueprint.”
“I enjoy using the architecture to ‘play’ the space in order to accentuate its properties,” Jobin says, and believes that architecture, the materials used in its construction – a space’s size and shape – all effect how deeper listening can be appreciated. “Bitwig,” she says, taking into account the more complex environments she’s worked, “enables me to explore this in a different way as I set to create sound installations and performances for multichannel works.”
Jobin’s natural, real-world concepts form an equal basis in her installation work, most notably in Inter/sperse from 2017: an eight-channel, 11-room, site-specific sound installation for Italy’s Museolaboratorio. “My audio art is distinguished by its minimalist approach to sound environments at the intersection of analog and digital,” Jobin says. “Although we experience an endless stream of diverse sounds, we are conditioned to tune them out,” Jobin feels. “I transform, manipulate and recycle sounds of everyday life to represent them in a new light,” she explains, posing that by extension her focus is on the physical comforts of the audience through a specifically designed, physical space.”
Jobin recently completed an artist residency for MESS (Melbourne’s Modular synth archive and workshop). MESS, an initiative of the Australian audio-visual artist Robin Fox and sound researcher Byron J Scullin, is dedicated to the creation of electronic music and is offering artists the possibility to record and produce their music in a fully functioning sound production workshop, which holds one of the most unique, eclectic and historically significant collections of electronic instruments in the world.
“I had access to incredible vintage and modular synths, which prompted me to explore how to connect Bitwig to them,” Jobin explains. “Manipulating the modular synths with Bitwig was a great discovery that sent me down a rabbit hole of creativity that will continue in my own studio.”
“Each of us has a unique identity-sensitivity; it is our job to develop and hone our skills in order to communicate as clearly and directly our ‘music personality’,” Jobin says. “It is the artist’s creative personality which will shine through,” she adds. “Bitwig will certainly enhance and ease the production rate of ambient music so long as artists are doing their job, capture their unique sensitivity and refine it to make that come through in their work.”
MORE ON FRANCE JOBIN
The video is an excerpt from the upcoming audiovisual performance (AUG 24) as DUO with Richard Chartier for Mutek Montreal.
France’s track “N” from the album Intrication released on No. is the soundtrack for Nora Gibson Contemporary Ballet’s new short ballet called, Mandala, created for the Dome at Fels planetarium and presented by the Franklin Institute.
At the Fels Planetarium – April 26-27 11:00 pm | Nora Gibson, Nora Gibson Contemporary Ballet – What might a ballet look like if it could happen outside the laws of physics?
In collaboration with Australian digital artist Jason Haggerty, and music by celebrated Canadian electronic composer France Jobin.
Honestly I sit here and wonder how much solitude this lady is getting these days, after spying on social media, what looked as though an all-encompassing trip around the world to down under, only to return to wintery Montreal where she is labouring in her spare time on water damage in her home. France Jobin‘s Solitude on Kim Cascone’s reborn Silence Records, is this globetrotter’s follow-up to the recently reviewed Duos(w/Richard Chartier) as well as her solo Intrication. The incredible (+ underrated) Canadian minimalist composer has broken into a deluxe territory of dreamstate sensation on this record sustained by luminous ambient texture and depth.
Here Jobin has arranged two long tracks, Solitude 1 & 2. The first part (33:30 run time) emerges slowly and keeps rising, wavering slowly expanding and filling the room with a robust yet fleeting array of resonances. It may be appropriate to note that sounds for this were mastered by Stephan Mathieu and recorded in various locations in Medellin, Colombia, perhaps this is a place where she manages to get away, find this solitude, or had a residency? Either way, these are most definitely tones that feel worn, and are well-thawed. The variables between vinyl crackle and wavy synth drone are active and mediating counterpoints. The deeper it goes the more fluid these disparate elements seem to align, reminding me of a gentle wake upon a crystal clear body of water.
The mid-tonal range is a bit of a traversing tunnel allowing the sonic flow to travel through and around the listener. It can be seen as ‘solitude’ yet more a bit detached than completely isolated. When Solitude 2 starts Jobin is playing with tonal separation and multi-directional cadence. The way the timbre moves from right/left channels is slightly off-putting at first, it’s asking my brain to move with is, back and forth, almost like a subliminal listening workout. After some variables in weight and other momentary abstract drifting drone, this begins to glide with its glitchy choppiness, on its own accord. Once things start to become textural and granular, and their are pockets of airy punctuation added you begin to understand the larger concept here, one of release, of breaching the everyday for a sense of respite, however fleeting.
Here … very very close to the ground, rough and dull, the imposing certainties, sticky, indolent, the renunciations, the voluntary withdrawal, the successive contempts, the secularized arrogances, modeling clay of disillusionments, the hermetic evidences, the silent tumult, sordid observation of bankruptcies without stakes, the precise glances, chilling, the sealed lips, the sharp entrenchment, the futile and disembodied hobbies, the petrified virtuous reason, the strict instructions for use … There, perhaps also here, the awakening, the vagabond vision, the synchronicity, the founder doubt, the nomadic gesture, the air weight, the crackling of a eurythmic pendulum, the brightness, an ephemeral interstice …
Ici … très très près du sol, rêche et terne, les prégnantes certitudes, poisseuses, indolentes, les renoncements, le repli volontaire, les mépris successifs, les arrogances sécularisées, la pâte à modeler les désillusions, les évidences hermétiques, le tumulte silencieux, sordide constat des faillites sans enjeu, les regards précis, glaçants, les lèvres scellées, le retranchement aiguisé, les hobbies futiles et désincarnés, la vertueuse raison pétrifiée, le strict mode d’emploi … Là, ici peut-être aussi, l’éveil, la vision vagabonde, la synchronicité, le doute fondateur, le geste nomade, le poids de l’air, le crépitement d’un balancier eurythmique, l’éclat, un éphémère interstice …
