Andrew Lewis’s Benllech Shells which appears on the disc Miroirs obscurs will be presented on February 6, 2009 at Sonic Spatial Perspectives in Leeds (UK). The keynote address will be presented by Jonty Harrison.

This dizzying construction has a duration of exactly 60 minutes — which means that it takes less time to listen to than it does to describe. A partial precis might g as follows: in order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of musique concrète and to underline the continuing relevance if Pierre Schaeffer’s pioneering techniques, Mathew Adkins invited 60 electronics composers and sound artists to submit a piece of sonic raw material. He then invited them to choose one o these submissions and subject it ti some form of studio treatment. Finally he retreated to the Ina-GRM studio in Paris with this audio cache to follow in the footsteps of Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony by creating a whole new piece from layered excerpts of other people’s work. He was able to create fantasy duets and imaginary ensembles, intermingling, for example, the contributions of Tim Hecker and Christian Fennesz — but these conceptual frolics remain opaque to the listener. Who will be struck, instead, by an impression of seamless motion — Adkins blends these awkward, haunting and darkly resonant fragments with considerable guile.

The work Les invisibles (available on Moment) by Hans Tutschku will be presented by CIRM at the auditorium of the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional in Nice on March 18, 2009 at 6pm.

Cinémathèque québécoise and France’s National Audiovisual Institute present 20th-century avant-garde music through film.

Montréal’s Cinémathèque québécoise has paired up once again with France’s National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) for a film series that focuses on sound and music. This fifth collaboration turns its focus to documentary and short films about the lives and art of contemporary, cutting-edge musicians and composers of the 20th century.

As part of its mission to collect, conserve, document and interpret film history, the Cinémathèque will screen the films every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 7pm during February, sharing 70 years of a vast collection of archived sound and film portraying the composers and musicians as well as some of their live performances.

The program focuses primarily on composers of concrete and electroacoustic music, joining their music with visual documentation. Starting in the 1950s with the inventor of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, the documentaries and short films in the series look at how a number of big names in this genre of music used technology and innovative methods of sound production as an integral part of their work during the 20th century.

The films portray artists such as Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Michel Chion, Hermann Scherchen, Pierre Henry, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Mauricio Kagel and Cecil Taylor, and their ingenious combination of art with science and technology.