The 19th edition of Akousma took place entirely at Usine C, a well-established multidisciplinary arts space in a former condiment factory that has been home to the festival since 2011. In the context of a city brimming with arts festivals and entertainment spectacles, the location feels well-considered. Tucked into a quiet, mostly residential block of Montreal’s Village neighbourhood, the unassuming brick building is an immaculate, insulated haven of sound in which to experience the particular magic of Akousma’s programming.
Founded in 1991, Akousma is rooted primarily in electroacoustic music, and throughout its rich history it has explored many styles, genres, and disciplines within and adjacent to that tradition. The 2023 festival was comprised largely of acousmatic pieces, i.e., compositions that exist as fixed media presented through speakers as opposed to live performances. For three consecutive nights, audiences were invited into the same sparse, high-ceilinged, industrial room for full evenings of experimental sound divided into two sections by fifteen-minute intermissions. Each evening, after a brief welcome from director general Rejéan Beaucage, a spotlight—accompanied by the prerecorded voice of artistic director Louis Dufort—would move through the custom-built thirty-two-speaker array, numbering each speaker to make the audience aware of the sonic adventures about to begin—a gesture as informative as it was playful. Throughout the festival, the layout and lighting choices shifted to serve the broad tonal palette presented.
Regional highlights from the first evening included pieces by Montreal-based multimedia artist Mourad Bncr and Quebec City sound artist Guillaume Coté. Bncr’s spacious piece The World After Us explored themes of place and hauntology, employing convolution reverb to evoke real-world locales and populating the evolving soundscape with grainy, mystifying minutiae. In a wonderful contrast, Coté performed a live iteration of his Discrete Stream of Light, a decidedly convex, arpeggiated piece for modular synth that, at times, recalled the bright playfulness of Laurie Spiegel while conveying a gripping gravitas. International highlights included a career-spanning piece from veteran French acousmatic composer Francis Dhomont and a riveting set from L.A.-based composer Sarah Belle Reid, whose visceral live performance—pairing live trumpet with interactive electronics—scrambled breathwork and quivering notes into a modular frenzy, with the player’s physicality and restraint conveying both curiosity and compassion.
The second night featured a meditative live set from Tomoko Sauvage, a Japanese artist based in Paris whose work centres around a set of electro-aquatic bowls fitted with hydrophones. Sitting cross-legged on the stage, Sauvage slowly brought the natural resonance and feedback of her water bowls into a gentle sonority. Watching her respond in real time, one sensed she was reacquainting herself with her instruments through deep listening. Montreal composer Pierre-Luc Senécal’s Broken Voices was described in the program notes with questions such as “How does one depict in music the ravages of war? How to make specific war trauma resonate universally? How to compose about an unexperienced reality?” Despite its noble intentions to address violent and difficult subject matter, the piece felt more sensational than sensitive. It also felt misplaced, sandwiched between two of the festival’s more sublime works. The program concluded with Finnish sound artist Marja Ahti, whose evocative pieces wove together field recordings, synth, acoustic feedback, and digital processing, delicately shifting between sounding real and unreal.
The third evening opened with a satisfyingly buoyant piece by local composer Nicola Giannini, followed by two new works written for the festival by Bénédicte, aka Montreal-based artist Maxime Gordon. Sitting somewhere between Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack music for the 1989 film Passion and the ethereal, left-field jungle tonalities that have recently re-emerged, Bénédicte’s pieces were dynamic, rich, and enlivening. Before the intermission, Spanish sound artist Elias Merino drilled open a post-digital portal with a bewildering, wildly intense, thirty-minute piece. It was easily the most punk-oriented piece at the festival, and thus compellingly at odds with the static nature of Akousma’s audience. Similarly, the second half of the program closed with a moving presentation from French artist Aho Ssan that felt too life-affirming to experience sitting down. Blending thrumming bass, beautiful strings, powerful vocals, and shattered piano, the piece felt profoundly cinematic. Somehow both sorrowful and uplifting, in the moments when the beats came full-on, it felt like an impossibly burly, prismatic reimagining of trip-hop.
Akousma’s program of well-considered sound works was inviting, adventurous, and challenging, and the technical presentation and attention to detail were fastidious and elegant. However, in a field of music so firmly rooted in academia, conceptual sound, and high-end equipment, presenters like Akousma should consider ways of making these soundworlds more accessible to new audiences, especially when inviting artists—such as Sarah Belle Reid—who are eager to demystify modular synthesis. One hopes Akousma will consider developing, for example, free educational programming to be presented alongside the performances; this would contribute to a richer understanding and broader enjoyment of the festival’s inimitable sonic wonder.
Andrew Patterson is a writer-reader-listener living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a programmer for Atlantic Canada’s only music festival dedicated to alternative realities, OBEY Convention.. He also plays bass in Canada’s hardest working ESG tribute band, EFG.