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Quelques reflets

Quelques Reflets (2009-10) is an electroacoustic composition in four parts: Reflets de notre société crépusculaire, commissioned by the GRM, Paris; Ces énigmes lumineuses, commissioned by Miso Music, Lisbon; For Ever Now Soon an End, commissioned by the TU, Berlin; and Les trois petits c…,, commissioned by Musiques et Recherches, Bruxelles. The work was completed during a yearlong sabbatical in which I undertook residencies at the above-mentioned studios with support from the Canada Council for the Arts ($15,000 CAD). The research methodology was designed to investigate 1) the use of the studio as a performance instrument, with specific emphasis on the subversion of my electric bass improvisation practice, mediated through custom software instruments; 2) the assimilation of other aesthetic genres into the post-acousmatic: noise music in Reflets, ambient in Énigmes, the Berlin Reductionists in Forever, and Hörspiel in Les 3 petits c…; and 3) the creative use of the 5.1 multichannel standard, both in sound design and mixing techniques. The work proposes new ways of thinking about issues of embodiment, with a focus on questions surrounding ontological ‘liveness’ in studio-practice. Practice and research are contextualised in a discussion of recent trends in critical improvisational performance in Tremblay, P.A. (2012) ‘Mixing The Immiscible: Improvisation within Fixed-Media Composition’. Proceedings of the EMS 2012 Conference, 11th-15th June 2012, Stockholm, Sweden. The paper is available online at: http://www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article350. Quelques Reflets has received over twenty performances and broadcasts including Akousma (Paris), Akousma (Montréal), Ultraschall (Berlin), Festival Música Viva (Lisbon), L’espace du son (Brussels), BEAST (Birmingham), and hcmf// 2011 (Huddersfield). The album was awarded the Opus Prize Electroacoustic Album of the Year in 2012.