4.35-R0-413 performed at EMPAC

france_jobin_mick_bello

Photo: Mick Bello

Thursday, October 15th 2015
Concert Hall
EMPAC
110 8th street,
Troy, NY 12180

 

The electronic music of composer France Jobin can be described as “sound-sculpture,” revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital methods intersect. While her music often makes use of restraint and limit, she isn’t one to shy away from extremes. Her skillful interplay between highs and lows, louds and softs, creates an intricate narrative, which stretches the listener’s perception and continually refocuses attention.

Using an array of specifically placed loudspeakers numbering in the dozens, Jobin will present a new work built for the EMPAC Concert Hall.

We’re offering a special ticket package for Thursday and Friday’s shows. For $20 ($10 for RPI students), admission is available to both Oneohtrix Point Never and France Jobin. Call the EMPAC box office at 518-276-3921.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

Singulum on LINE

 

singulum_cover

France Jobin
Singulum
LINE_075
CD + Digital
Edition of 400
February 2016

Returning to LINE after her critically acclaimed 2012’s Valence (LINE_054), France Jobin brings us the four sparse elegant works that comprise Singulum. 

Quantum physics inspires me to draw a parallel between the fundamental building blocs of physics, sounds and music. I put field recordings through a series of editing and manipulation processes which result in very different sounds from their origins. These manipulations affect time, timbre, harmonics and the essence of each sound, whereas composition influences how they relate to each other.

Singulum represents an unattainable goal, the process of decay while conserving a continuation of information.

All sounds recorded at various locations in North America, Europe, and Japan and at EMS (Stockholm) using the Serge and the Buchla 200 modular synthesizers as well as the Nord Modular.

Cover image: Mark Hogben.

Thank you to EMS (Stockholm), Sporobole (Sherbrooke), EMPAC (Troy), Andreas Tilliander, Argeo Ascani, Fabio Perletta (Farmacia 901), Ennio Mazonn (CConfin).
Special thanks to Richard Chartier and Mark Hogben.

TRACKS:
1.  n (16:58)
2.  l (06:30)
3.  m (08:55)
4.  s (13:35)

LINE

Empac – residency October 5th – 16th 2015, concert etc

ESTO_AaronEsto_50

Residency – October 5th – October 16th 2015
Concert – October 15th 2015 – 8pm Concert Hall
In conversation :  Mark Fell and France Jobin – October 7th 2015 – 7pm

Concert

The electronic music of composer France Jobin can be described as “sound-sculpture,” revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital methods intersect. While her music often makes use of restraint and limit, she isn’t one to shy away from extremes. Her skillful interplay between highs and lows, louds and softs, creates an intricate narrative, which stretches the listener’s perception and continually refocuses attention.

Using an array of specifically placed loudspeakers numbering in the dozens, Jobin will present a new work built for the EMPAC Concert Hall.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

CURATOR: 

ARGEO ASCANI

In conversation : Mark Fell and France Jobin

Often, the mark of excellence in electronic music and sound art is the ability of the composer to hide their identity and virtuosity behind an inscrutable bank of machinery or within the ambient acoustics of the space in which the piece is performed. Whether or not this obfuscation is willful, it results in a genre of music that is vastly diverse in both its effects and technical configurations. In this conversation between Mark Fell and France Jobin, two masters of their understated craft will step forward to engage in dialogue and answer questions about the aesthetics, techniques, and politics of their work.

Fell has been in residence at EMPAC to develop Recursive Frame Analysis, a new work for sound, light, and dance; meanwhile, Jobin has been working on the premiere of a multi-channel sound piece for the Concert Hall.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, UK. He is widely known for combining popular music styles such as electronica and techno with more academic approaches to computer-based composition, with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. As well as recorded works, he produces installation pieces, often using multiple speaker systems. He started his career in the ’90s house and techno scene as one half of electronic duo SND and released The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making earlier this year on label The Death of Rave.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

 

 

Review of Empac concert – “Akousma,” EMPAC Studio 2, 10/7/11 – Barton McLean

 

from “Barton McLean, Reviewer, Computer Music Journal.”

Réseaux des arts médiatiques presents “Akousma,” EMPAC Studio 2, 10/7/11

Since its inception in 1991,  Réseaux has dedicated itself to presenting and later commissioning electronic music works from Canadian and non-Canadian composers alike. Based in Montreal and amply funded by national, provincial, city, and other funding, it has garnered a unique place in the development of all forms of electronic music in Canada and internationally.  It assigns the broad title “electro music” to all forms of electronic and computer music, with prominent subheadings “electroacoustic,” “concrète,” and “acousmatic.”

The EMPAC audience was treated to a preview of a much larger festival in Montreal to occur the following week. Titled “Akousma,” this sound diffusion concert consisted of an array of 20 loudspeakers configured in bottom and top rows, with a few in the middle, all surrounding and above the audience, with fewer discrete channels (at times 8, at times 6, at other times undetermined).  The overall sound quality was spectacular (as we have come to expect from EMPAC), with clarity and finesse of frequency response unparalleled.

Although the stylistic mission of Réseaux is broad-based, the work of three of the four composers on this concert was rather traditionally oriented in sonic materials I would characterize as granular-based, white noise-derived, rapidly moving sound events usually divorced from traditional tempered pitch/rhythm elements, opting instead for the juxtaposition of gesture, silence, peppered with occasional sections of low key continuity.  If this sounds like a general description of your average electroacoustic concert of today, you are right.  Although these three composers managed to exhibit  technical skill in crafting the sound event, there was rarely anything to distinguish one piece from another in this milieu of common practice style that has so permeated the scene for the past decade.

One exception to this was a powerfully executed section of “Qui-vive” by Pierre-Yves Macé, in which a quasi-microtonal gestural melodic idea was repeated over several minutes with variations, to the accompaniment of a gradually rising tension in other stratified layers, producing a grand feeling of inexorable forward motion, prompting this reviewer to the conclusion that this common practice style still has room for growth in the hands of a masterful creator.

Speaking of masterful, France Jobin’s “Valence of one” forced the audience to sit up and take notice, not because of any new wild gestural statement as we had come to expect, but rather from the sheer quietness and slow pace.  The overall scheme was simplicity itself, with two main sections, the first being various derivatives of a major second chord sounding with other fleeting pitches and timbres entering and exiting unobtrusively, and the second, the same the treatment of what was basically a major triad with added sixth.  This was punctuated by an occasional piano-like note pinging against the otherwise continuous montage of sound.  Twenty minutes later, when this longest work of the evening quietly ended, I was startled, since I felt that I was just beginning to feel extremely comfortable and engaged in a wonderful world where time stood still.  It was as if awakening from a deeply satisfying dream.  How she managed to engage the audience with such simple means still escapes me, but engage she did, masterfully.

Akousma at Empac

AKOUSMA at Empac

Friday October 7, 8:00 PM – Studio 2

EMPAC is located at the corner of 8th Street and College Avenue, in Troy, NY.

Presenting international works across the spectrum of electronic music, this concert highlights selections from this year’s eighth annual AKOUSMA festival in Montréal. Pierre-Yves Macé (France), France Jobin (Canada), Horacio Vaggione (France/Argentina), and Louis Dufort (Canada) will be interpreting their works live over a 16-speaker system surrounding the audience.

AKOUSMA is produced by Réseaux, a composer-run organization dedicated to presenting and commissioning electroacoustic music since 1991. Montréal is the North American hub for electronic music, offering a wide range of festivals spanning dance music, acoustics research, and everything in between.

Curator: Micah Silver

Bios:France Jobin, aka i8u, is a Montréal-based sound/installation/web artist and curator. Jobin’s audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture,” and her installation/web art incorporates both musical and visual elements.

France Jobin has created solo recordings for ROOM40, NVO, and Bake/Staalplaat, among others, and has had many collaborations, including with Goem, Martin Tétreault, David Kristian, and Tomas Phillips.

She has participated in web work/installations in Québec and Toronto, and in various music and new technology festivals in Canada, Europe, and the United States, including Silophone, MUTEK, Le Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Ver Uit de Maat, send + receive, Les Digitales, Club Transmediale, velak, Shut up and Listen!, ISEA2010 RUHR, and immersound, as well as a soundtrack with Bubblyfish for the film Swordswoman of Huangjiang (Huangjiang Nuxia), presented at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Her latest endeavor, immersound, is a concert event/philosophy that proposes to create a dedicated listening environment by focusing on the physical comfort of the audience through a specifically designed space. The premise is to explore new perceptions and experiences of the listening process by pushing the notion of “immersion” to its possible limits. The first immersound was produced in February 2011 at the OBORO gallery in Montréal.

Jobin’s work continues to evolve as technologies enable her to create in new environments.

Montréal composer Louis Dufort’s music ranges from a cathartic form of expressionism to a focus on the inner structure of sound matter.

Dufort developed his style through electroacoustic music, and then turned his attention to mixed music and multimedia art, and has worked with a wide range of organizations, including the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), the Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM), the Quasar saxophone quartet and Bozzini string quartet, the Ensemble de flûtes Alizé, Réseaux, the Quebec Association for Creation and Research in Electroacoustics (ACREQ), and Chants Libres, for which he wrote the music for the 2005 opera, L’Archange

In 2007, Dufort was commissioned by Société Radio‐Canada (SRC) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) to make a video and acousmatic remix of Glenn Gould’s recordings for the pianist 75th birthday.

In 2001, Dufort received a mention from Prix Ars Electronica (Austria); in 2005, he was invited to work at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Germany, and in 2007, he was a guest of Recombinant Media Labs (RML) in San Francisco. He has worked with choreographer Marie Chouinard since1996, and their collaborations have been regularly acclaimed, including Body_Remix, which premiered at the Venice Biennial in 2005.

Dufort teaches at Montréal’s Music Conservatory. He was named artistic director of Réseaux in 2010, and he begins his first season with a concert at EMPAC.

Pierre-Yves Macé is a French musician whose musical practice encompasses improvisation on machines, a background in piano and classical percussion, jazz-rock/prog-rock bands, dance accompaniments, and an interest in literature and musicology. He received his PhD in musicology in 2009, which explored phonography and the “sound document” in contemporary music. His first recording, Faux-Jumeaux, was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2002. Subsequently, he released Circulations (Sub Rosa, 2005), and Crash_Test II (Tensional Integrity) (Orkhêstra, 2006) for a string quartet. He has held residencies at CalArts in Los Angeles, CNMAT in Berkeley (2004), and GRM in Paris (2006, 2008). Macé has performed in the Octobre Festival in Normandie, MIMI, Villette Sonique, Brocoli, Transnumériques, and Présences électronique. His artistic collaborations include projects with ON (Sylvain Chauveau & Steven Hess), That Summer, Louisville, artist Hippolyte Hentgen, and writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, and Christophe Fiat. He is also a member of the Encyclopédie de la parole, a speech encyclopedia crew whose goal is to constitute a compositional plan through which different forms of recorded speeches may be compared.

Horacio Vaggione is an Argentinian-born electroacoustic and musique concrète composer who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound, and whose pieces often are for performer and computer‐generated tape. He studied composition at the National University in Córdoba and the University of Illinois, where he first gained exposure and access to computers.

Vaggione visited every electronic studio in Europe during the 1970s. From 1969 to 1973 he lived in Madrid, Spain, where he was part of the ALEA group. He also co‐founded an electronic studio and music and computer projects at the Autonomous University of Madrid with Luis de Pablo. In 1978, he moved to France, where he still resides, and begin work at GMEB in Bourges, INA‐GRM and IRCAM in Paris, where his music moved from synthesized and sampled loops (as in La Maquina de Cantar, produced on an IBM computer) toward micromontage. Since 1994, he has been a professor of music at the University of Paris VIII, where he organized the Centre de recherche Informatique et Création Musicale (CICM).

About EMPAC

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) opened its doors in 2008 and was hailed by the New York Times as a “technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses… dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before.”

Founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EMPAC offers artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, designers, and audiences opportunities for creative exploration that are available nowhere else under a single roof. EMPAC operates nationally and internationally, attracting creative individuals from around the world and sending new artworks and innovative ideas onto the global stage.

EMPAC’s building is a showcase work of architecture and a unique technological facility that boasts unrivaled presentation and production capabilities for art and science spanning the physical and virtual worlds and the spaces in between.