Showcase of Canadian and Québec Artists in Barcelona

Always an outward-looking, globally-tuned organization, MUTEK was initiated to connect Montréal with international creators and to encourage creativity at home by giving local artists a quality platform for expression and development. The festival’s commitments to networks, interconnectivity and exchange culminate in another strong showing by Canadian and Québec artists at MUTEK Spain. Following on last year’s Inter_Connect program in Montréal which saw a day of showcases focussed on Barcelona, the mandate to mingle and cross-pollinate artists and projects internationally continues at the ninth edition of MUTEK.ES.

Thanks to the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Embassy of Canada in Spain a total of 6 artists will be performing in Barcelona.

Alexandre Burton & Julien Roy (artificiel) — Three Pieces With Titles

Who: Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy, co-founders of Montréal-based digital creation studio, artificiel
Style: Immersive audiovisual installations and performances, electroacoustic compositions, custom-built software and hardware

A MUTEK commission developed with the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Three Pieces With Titles relies on a new, souped-up, extreme real-time, audiovisual instrument that merges cameras, synthesizers, acoustic instruments, computers, and video projectors. The “three pieces” refer to three distinct movements: the image controls the sound (photographs trigger a camera plus a computer system linked to audio); the sound controls the image (an instrument triggers a camera plus computer system linked to photographs); and the sound is the image is the sound (colour turns into sound, acoustic vibration changes the colour and vice-versa).

➤ Read the interview with MUTEK Mag

Alexis Langevin-Tétrault — Interférences (String Network)

Who: Montreal-based composer, musician and performance artist Alexis Langevin-Tétrault, aka Alexeï Kawolski, also in groups QUADr, Falaises, BetaFeed and Recepteurz
Style: Electroacoustic compositions, physically focused audiovisual performance, minimal electronic

Langevin-Tétrault offers an action-oriented allegory of freedom in our modern interconnected world by progressively building Interférences (String Network) on stage: a unique and imposing audiovisual string instrument that interprets his electro-acoustic composition in real-time while setting off an audio-reactive play of light.

➤ Watch an interview of Herman Kolgen at MUTEK Buenos Aires

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Who: Montréal-based composer, musician and producer
Style: Multi-layered electroacoustic compositions, dense and unfamiliar narratives steeped in contrasts of consonance and noise

As at-home surrounded by wires and synths as she is before a pipe organ, Kara-Lis Coverdale blurs the lines between human and machine in multiple channel, multi-timbral collages that conjure symphonies of the sacred, profane and transcendent while navigating new ecologies with an ease we cannot yet comprehend. Informed by a Masters degree in musicology and composition and an ingrained love of hip-hop and rap, sampling, and capsized New Age, Coverdale’s music mobilizes traditional vocal and instrumental sources into surreal dreams of earthly existence.

➤ Listen

Lucas Paris — AntiVolume IN/EXT

Who: Montréal-based musician and digital artist Lucas Paris, member of electroacoustic quartet Quadr and A/V outfit Betafeed
Style: Immersive synesthetic environments, space-specific algorithmic light sculptures, ambient fantastical IDM, corroded rhythmic noise

Live, Paris presents recent results of algorithmic research in a sensory physical and textural, socio-politically resonant performance. His light and sound-sculpting A/V work AntiVolume IN/EXT explores the constant motions and dynamics between timbre and colour, interior and exterior, reinterpreting ambient noise, techno tropes and rave-ish rhythms.