Having studied music and sound art amongst many other artistic disciplines, I was intrigued about this year’s Montreal Nouvelles Musiques. The biennial of international sound and music is in its third and largest edition, featuring over 700 musicians.
Last Saturday, the festival’s opening night, I met up with Walter Boudreau, the show’s director. “With this festival, we want to promote all types of avant-garde musical creation, from new electric rock, to sound art, to experimental music,” said Boudreau. “This year some of our international artists include Copenhagen’s Theatre of Voices and Paris’s Court Circuit,” he added “and the festival will be aired on European radio.” Boudreau will also be conducting the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal on March 8 for Sans peur et sans reproche!
The festival’s opening show, Spatio Lumino, presented diverse music, starting with Theresa Transistor, a group experimenting with time and winter. The second part of the show featured Delphine Measroch and Nicholas Bernier’s three part Treelogy, which consisted of electronic sounds mixed with some traditional instruments, played over their respective videos illustrating trees, fields, and rain. Although the overall effect was quite successful in the second piece, it seemed as though the sounds were mostly additions to the videos.
Also playing were some members of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. Unfortunately, most of the pieces seemed to resemble each other, and the audience got confused as to what was going on. One of my guests said: “I kept catching on to something interesting and waiting for it to evolve, but instead it ended and started in another only slightly different direction.”
A significant part of the audience had left by the time Espaces sonores illimites began their performance, Spatio Lumino. This band of musicians improvised with an array of instruments to the ‘code’ of a lighting interface, which was truly original and thrilling.
The festival’s mission of promoting avant-garde music is important, and it will definitely show many talented artists. Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck in a time when technology is evolving so fast, a number of contemporary artworks seem to be solely about the technology itself. That being said, every era has had its handful of new and original artists, and it’s worth checking out this festival to discover them, and to just listen to some intriguing sounds.
The festival MNM runs til March 8. Programme @ www.festivalmnm.ca.
