Until Sunday, August 28, Montreal once again becomes the world capital of digital arts and cutting-edge electronic music thanks to the 23e edition of the MUTEK festival, its virtual exhibition of digital art, its forum, its conferences and workshops and, for main course, a poster filled with musical and audiovisual performances by the cream of the international and local electronic avant-garde.
On Thursday evening, the prolific composer Automatisme and the versatile digital artist Marilou Lyonnais Archambault will create a “praise [numérique] to Landscaping” at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT).
“Both of us are big fans of jazz”, specifies William Jourdain, alias Automatisme, speaking of the pair he forms with Marilou Lyonnais Archambault. “We are two music lovers, two visual arts fans who have studied [le domaine] at university” and who, on Thursday, will join forces and ideas again to, as his colleague summarizes, study our relationship to the landscape, “William on the sound level, and me in a more visual way”.
The two artists are interested “in dematerialized landscapes, in the idea of nature, in the tension existing between the machine and nature, and therefore in digital landscapes, details Marilou. What we are preparing for Thursday is a performance where, for my part, I will recycle images used during our previous collaborations, adding original material, but always on the theme of landscapes. All presented via abstraction, halfway between the real and the virtual”.
Questioning the ecological footprint
A graduate in art history and in visual and media arts education at UQAM, Marilou Lyonnais Archambault also takes a critical look at our digital lives — “critical, but paradoxical” with regard to nature, she. “The sampling of images [de paysages et de nature] that I rework always comes from the web, for example from digitized archives, but because of this web-based approach, I am part of the problem since I spend resources, energy, to create. It’s very paradoxical: I criticize our current digital condition, but I myself leave an ecological footprint by doing so. »
Marilou and William discussed their respective artistic concepts and practices for a few years before starting a first collaboration; in 2020 she designed the album cover Alter-Vol. 2 which the latter recorded with veteran Pheek, a duet called Viatorism. Last May, William Jourdain launched two albums a few days apart for which Marilou imagined video images: the arid and powerful Static published by the mythical German record company Mille Plateaux, then the harmonious and contemplative Gap/Voidcollaboration with Swiss sound artist Stefan Paulus, published by Constellation Records.
Fresh material from these two albums will form the bulk of the performance’s soundtrack. “I’m happy, MUTEK gives me the opportunity to combine these two very different albums. It will be a great challenge. If the linear rhythmic structures of Automatisme are detailed on each of these albums, the contribution of the Swiss composer comes to temper the rough and austere sonorities to which Jourdain subjects us on Statican album born out of worry and the coldness of winter.
Between the abstract and the concrete
“To give you a short story, I had a son a year ago, born with a heart defect, says William. Before and during his operation, I didn’t sleep, so I finished the production of the album – putting a lot of saturation on it [dans le son], grain, noise. There is a very emotional intensity to this album, very dry and very raw. »
Marilou continues: “Her album Gap/Void rather refers to the landscapes of the Swiss Alps”, Paulus having contributed to the music with his nature recordings. “My images will sometimes be inspired by the Boréalie, and by the idea of vertigo. Visually, I will present more natural landscapes than urban ones”, specifies the artist, who also touches on musical creation through the dub/ambient duo Saudade which she forms with composer Nela Paki — a second EP by the duo should see the day in 2023.
“We both try [dans nos démarches] to find a space between concrete and abstract art, tries to sum up William. There is something in our work that is devoid of referents, but at the same time a sublimation of the landscape, of its strength, which implies certain pictorial referents. The mixture of these two things touches me, since that’s a lot of what I do in sound, working a lot from soundscapes, field recordings. It’s as if our computers were playing jazz, and we were going to pick up moments from what he was playing; it is very complex, as nature is. »