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Myriam Bleau is a composer, digital artist and performer based in Montreal. She creates audiovisual systems that go beyond the screen, such as sound installations and performance-specific musical interfaces. Her hybrid electronic practice explores music performance as a codified cultural manifestation and recontextualizes pop culture elements and music history tropes. For ‘Lumens & Profits’ Myriam has exported this ethos towards pure sound design, deconstructing a palette of familiar musical forms into 8 pieces of wandering, weightless movements; where Vocal samples and percussive rushes launch themselves from empty space, repeatedly shattering any vibe you were about to ease yourself into. Rhythms scatter, violently collapse, and pick themselves up again grinning with hands aloft, sprinting towards the light.

This is the sound of an artist who clearly has a deep interest in modern tropes of UK bass music and contempory electronic composition, but due to Myriam’s historical grounding as a tactile, experimental audio visual artist these genres become uniquely filtered through a performative, Musique Concrete focused lens. In this sense the pieces end up as somewhat hybrids, absorbing Myriam’s rich performance based musical history and sweeping into the mix the outer corners of avant garde 80’s sampler experiments, Hip-Hop Turntablism, and classical elements. With ‘Lumens & Profits’ Myriam has managed to create something which sounds distinctly fresh in approach, whilst managing to playfully & respectfully nod towards a tidal wave of cultural movements.

‘Lumens & Profits’ is heavily influenced by Myriam’s own ‘Musical Spinning Top’ A/V performance ‘Soft Revolvers’ (viewing a section of the spellbinding performance does the piece far greater justice than I could ever try to clumsily put into words - https://vimeo.com/104996493). Whilst inspiration was gleamed from the performance Myriam is keen to separate the two projects, explaining - “While composing these pieces, I was very occupied by the idea of modulated speed or tempo that came from my spinning top performance. Seeing instruments on different tempos that fluctuate rather than run on different strict patterns. I tried to imagine freely moving instrumental lines that only momentarily align, rather than a grid or tempo that would control all the elements. A lot of the pieces rely on algorithmic arpeggiation (custom max patches), as a way to create processes that control the speed and timbral width of sounds dynamically.”

Fans of Lee Gamble, Tomoko Sauvage, Mark Fell, RKSS, Holly Herndon, Christian Marclay take note here, dive in and get lost.