SUBSTRAT - Sound immersion in the dome

Biography :

Canadian performance artist and composer Erin Gee ( TIO’TIA:KE – MONTREAL) takes inspiration from her experience as a vocalist and applies it to poetic and sensorial technologies, likening the vibration of vocal folds to electricity and data across systems, or vibrations across matter.

Gee is a DIY expert in affective biofeedback, implicating the body of the listener as part of her cybernetic systems in place. Through principles of emotional labor, emotional measurement, emotional performance, and emotional reproduction, she has made work in neural networks, choral composition, ASMR, virtual reality, networked music performance, and robotics foreground issues of critical empathy, unconscious sensory programming, and divisions between emotion and reason.

Gee’s work has been shown in solo exhibition at MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA) and in group exhibitions at MUTEK (AR/ES/CA), LEV Festival (ES), Darling Foundry (CA), Toronto Biennale (CA), NRW Forum (DE), and Ars Electronica (AT).

Project description :

Erin will be presenting an excerpt of We As Waves (which premiered at ISEA2022), a performance for voice, electroacoustic music, and sonified physiological markers of affect (heartbeat, skin conductance, and respiration). Using techniques like guided meditation, hypnosis, and Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), Gee uses her voice to trigger physiological response in ten performers wearing her DIY biofeedback hardware, thus, structuring music through affective engagement.

Biography :

Rafaelle Mackay is a vocalist, composer, musical director, therapeutic musician and sound artist. Inspired by a deep inner connection to the power of the human voice, her sound is expansive, evocative and intriguing.

Rafaelle often is featured as a vocalist with multiple DJs and electronic music producers, such as Kora, Mercendede, Dexter Crowe, Jack Essek & Stéphane Salerno and is a performing and creative member of Cosmovision records.
Rafaelle has also been part of the meditative music movement for the last 2 decades, through her meditative concert series, and her album MAYU, which is appreciated by practitioners of various meditative arts across the globe.
Her vocal tone, smooth and profound, has been influenced both by the study of vocal Jazz at Concordia University and Hindustani classical vocal studies in Northern India.

Her Project ‘HUMAN INSTRUMENT’ debuted at la SAT and performed in both 2018 & 2019 as a multimedia performance in the Satosphere, where her acapella voice derives and displays the visual and synesthetic effects of Cymatics.

Rafaelle’s creative vocal soundscapes have been chosen to be part of the immersive exposition, Oasis Recharger-Unwind 2021 in the palais de congres in Montreal.

Project description :

Melting with allies is inspired by the importance of honoring our planet, our bodies, our voices and our relationship within them all. Our allies, the elements: water, fire, wind, earth, and the cosmos; as well as our voice, are vital reminders of the essence of life. The more we can feel them and embrace them, the more we can potentially inspire a deeper change in our relationship with the earth and our human vitality. Melting with allies is a sonic journey lead by vocal textures and live vocal effects, mixed with bass frequencies from underwater sounds, water ways and thunder. It is also an exploration of sounds from natural disasters, such as forest fires and tsunamis, thus creating an audio immersive experience where the audience will have no choice to melt with their many allies. This audio immersive experience is intended to help one remember the essentials of being and ultimately relax and melt into the present moment.

Biography :

Singer, performer, composer, multidisciplinary artist, author, and producer, Mykalle has been operating in the arts’ world since her graduation from interpretation at UQAM in 2011. She has made a respectable name for herself in the Quebec’s arts scene with her voice, her intimate music, her meditative shows, and her ability to summon the sublime. After the release of her 2013 EP, Bielinski has been exploring stage direction and liturgical music in her trilogy on the contemporary sacred.

Project description :

For Substrat, Mykalle Bielinski presents an experience where the lyrical, the sacred, and the spiritual take the lead. Inspired by vocal traditions of the Middle East, by Bulgarian chants, and by the Orthodox liturgical cannons, she gives up her voice as a guide and a vessel for the public’s imagination and to facilitate mindful meditative trance states. Supported by synthesizers and rhythmic elements, the show is sure to summon an introspective renewal within the audience and to dive into the quintessence of affect.

Biography :

Debbie Doe is an electronic musician, 3D sound designer. Pursuing studies in electroacoustic’s at Concordia University, they are inspired by theater and the concept of play, their music takes on different roles, where spacious percussions meet unusual samples. In perpetual search of new creative methods and techniques, they are developing with certainty an approach to musical composition in which sound in space and its movement play a central role. They use different techniques of sampling inspired by the work of John Cage and others to create a hypnotizing atmosphere ensuring that its experimental sounds play different roles, especially for theater and performance. They developed astute techniques for sampling cassette tapes and analog gear to craft their atmospheric tracks and live sets.

Project description :

Awaken Dream is an acousmatic composition that uses auditory allusions to explore the multiplicity of being. A fantastical journey made of resampled, granulated, and spatialized material, the piece invites listeners into a conscious theater where participants become their own persona and transcend, followed by rebirth.

Biography :

MAYSUN offers immersive instrumental music that evokes melancholy, acceptance and hope. This project combines drums, synthesizers and sound design to create a universe where the digital and the organic merge. Releases include works such as Wanderlust II (2022), Waiting Spaces (2020), The After Mountain (2020) and more than 700 improvisational pieces between 2017 and today.

Project description :

MAYSUN’s work explores the relationship between the temporality and spatiality of sound. This project is based around the use of sounds from real life environments and transforming them into musical tones to be used in the creation of soundscapes. The sounds sampled are transformed using tape cassette, physical spaces, modular synthesis, feedback and effect pedals. This allows the sound to be altered in pitch spliced and stretched, adding imperfections and artifacts along the way. The compositions are created as if they were soundtracks to life events. This process aims to add depth to the listening experience by giving a sense of time and space throughout the music.

Biography :

Montreal-based artist Kee Avil combines guitar, voice and electronic production into songs that teeter on the edge of collapse, while trudging along, as through sticky wax. The abstraction and the real intertwine, as familiarity teases its way through an experimental lens. As a solo performer, her focus and energy carries the music forward, rushing from memory to instinct to audience.

Project description :

Kee Avil presents a collection of tracks from her freshly released album, Crease, in the Satopshere. For Substrat, the show focuses on exploring spatialization of Vicky Mettler’s voice in the dome, as to draw its audio-somatic potential. Accompanied by drummer Samuel Gougoux and sound designer Zachary Scholes, the project takes a reactive turn, where the musicians follow each other closely through irregular rhythms and a seemingly no wave performance.

Biography :

The artists of RedSpills (Seta, Stewart, and Stromberg) embrace new musical instrument technologies (digital lutherie) and how these instruments can be reapplied in performance. They share their music through innovative approaches that engage audiences in both experimental and contemporary mediums involving telematic performances and VR/XR. At the forefront of RedSpills’ activities is an interest in improving an integrated technological delivery of distributed live sound performances and 3D imagery. Music performances combine internet infrastructure (e.g., browser-based VR/XR landscapes, audio/video transmission protocols) with experimental approaches to sound synthesis (e.g., integration of the Faust programming language into the metaverse).

Project description :

Coming soon.

Biography :

Summoning mystical soundscapes, traveling between the planes of electroacoustic music, black metal and doom metal. Started in 2019, Sol Miracula‘s approach roams from immersive sound to a lo-fi aesthetic while challenging the role of gesture and theatricality in performance, like the casting of a spell where time is distorted, in suspension.

Sol Miracula is the project of Yanik Tremblay-Simard, who studied electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal and explored multiphonic composition (pieces for 8 speakers), digital arts, creative coding and visual arts. He studied under the mentorship of Nicolas Bernier, Robert Normandeau, Jean Piché and Ana Dall’ara-Majek. He gets inspiration from experimental cinema, heavy metal and minimalism in many medias.

He also plays in various other projects including death/black metal band Shezmu; dark ambient collaborative, multidisciplinary project Macroplasm (With Diego Bermudez-Chamberland). He also played guitar in doom metal band AIAUASCA, and did a few electronic works with collaborative project grand Vent.

Project description :

In Plague Artifact: Three Pieces, Sol Miracula summons the mystic, the sacred, and the fantastic. He embodies a prophetic figure whose body acts as summoning conduit of a spiritual and contemplative hymn. With this lyrical theme in mind, Sol Miracula puts forward the sonic possibilities of a gestural interface in the context of immersive performance. This interface consists solely of the usage of the augmented theremin.

The theremin, an electronic instrument played through precise positioning of the body in relation to the device, is used as a controller in a complex computer system. Thus, the sonic palette of the theremin becomes infinite and its musical possibilities grow manifold, augmented. With this interface, Sol Miracula tweaks the intrinsic parameters of sound, spatialization, balance of the aural fiber, as well as temporal parameters, such as to claim full control over the work’s progression.

Thanks to this augmented theremin, the performer’s space directly meshes with the musical space by removing the musician from the computer, yet still at the center of the creative process. Sounds are sculpted and manipulated through gestural means and thus the sonic and corporeal realms become one. The nature of Plague Artifact: Three Pieces then ties the fields of theatre and of the mystical.

Biography :

Anna Pavlova is a Moscow-born and Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist, music producer, vocalist, and DJ working under the alias Softmatter. Softmatter’s sonic methodology explores mutant, discordant electronics, alongside bouncing, stony drums and pitch-shifted vocals that travel between steepled choral motifs. Her latest releases include ‘Hyle’ EP on Infinite Machine, singles ‘Atemporal’ and ‘Free Entropy’ issued via compilations on Infinite Machine and Soulfeeder and Muscle Performance EP on Halocline Trance Records.

Project description :

In her performance Softmatter taps into visceral experiences, blending futuristic electronics, granulated percussion and mutant vocal layers. Her sounds seep raw emotion deep from the underworlds of consciousness, evoking the material and spiritual dimensions of her sonic universe.