MUTEKLIVE123 - Désormais

Désormais (CA)
Friday June 3, 2016 - Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC)

WHO: Toronto-based musician and composer Mitchell Akiyama and Toronto-based formerly-Cincinnati-based American musician, composer and sound engineer Tony Boggs, aka Joshua Treble and Unfollow, the duo is also known as Letters Letters
STYLE: Rough and textured melodies, propulsive and fractal rhythms and song
LATEST WORK: Zero Likes (2015) (Tony Boggs as Unfollow)
LABELS: Intr.version Records, Kikimora Tapes, Type Records, Raster-Noton, Sub Rosa, Staalplaat, Alien8
MORE: Akiyama founded Intr.version Records while living in Montréal; Boggs runs Kikimora Tapes. Désormais’ first album was mastered by Tim Hecker.
MUTEKs: Akiyama at MUTEK @ Marseille 2003; Montréal: 2002, 2001

Mitchell Akiyama and Tony Boggs began their collaboration in 2001 and continued “coaxing haunting music from haunted machines” despite their geographic distance, using online exchanges and phone calls to complete three albums between 2002 and 2005 for Akiyama’s label Intr.version. Now both in Toronto, they’ve reunited as Désormais to continue making music that folds guitars, violins, drum machines and field recordings into evocative and evolving composerly suites.

Though Désormais had been idle for several years, both Akiyama and Boggs remained immersed in the realm of music and sound. Akiyama in academic studies – he has a PhD in communications with a focus on sound recording in the field – he also composed for film, dance performances and art installations, and recorded over 10 solo albums. He was recently part of the creative team behind interactive art work Impulsions, a series of seesaws fitted with movement-activated lighting and sound, temporarily installed outdoors in Montréal this past winter. Bogg’s first appeared musically in Cincinnati in the late 90s. Once transplanted to Canada, he founded his label Kikimora Tapes, featuring underground avant-rock and shoegaze-drone.

A resurrection of the avant-garde kind, the Désormais show at MUTEK 2016 was the duo’s first live performance in 10 years.