Akusma Forum is a project initiated by a renowned Polish composer, and previous artistic director of Musica Electronica Nova Elżbieta Sikora. The Forum presents the audience with a diverse panorama of new music created by artists from different countries. This year, it will be France, Canada, and Greece.
“Four Machines that Can Save the World” was the title of a project carried out several years ago and involving students from the Jean-Baptist Meilleur school in Montreal. They invented devices that would help to remedy the negative effects of climate change. The participants in the undertaking could act without any restrictions or directives. Their suggestions became the inspiration for Léa Boudreau, who created a sound panorama of the devices they invented: a flying machine that purifies the air, a robot that saves homeless and abandoned animals, a device that collects snow to prevent it from melting, and a boat that removes waste from ocean waters.
Mélanie Frisoli also focuses on issues related to the potential of machinery. In Le Chant de la machine, she explores the boundaries of technology and attempts to extract sound from digital silence. The soundscape created by the composer emerges from an impasse, the source of which is a computer pushed to the extreme. Nicolas Bernier’s work is a specific study of the dialogue between sound and tangible matter. In his Aluminium piercing micro-explosions gradually lead to the expansion of metallic sound volume.
Hervé Birolini, who serves as the curator of this year’s Akusma Forum series, will also reach for the work of French composers who were important to him and with whom he became close: Jean-Marc Duchenne and François Donato. In particular, in tribute to Donato, who passed away less than half a year ago and was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales – a body focused on research into sound and electroacoustic music – Birolini will perform his Quatre allégories d'amour.
Read interviews with the composers: Nicolas Bernier, Léa Boudreau, François Donato and Jean-Marc Duchenne prepared by Distortions Studio.