Sapphire Slows & Myriam BoucherJP+QC
Sapphire Slows is what you might call an everything-ist: she produces, DJs, plays synth and her eerie, drone-like vocals float over her tracks, embellishing their shadowy textures. After the brutal awakening of the 2011 earthquakes in Japan, she became motivated to pursue a career in music.
Now a notable name in Tokyo’s electronic music scene, she has toured Norths America, Europe, China, Australia and her home country of Japan, and released an impressive body of work, with LPs, EPs, tracks and remixes coming out on the likes of Not Not Fun, 100% Silk, Kaleidoscope, Nous Disques, Kalahari Oyster Cult, Hivern Discs and most recently AD93.
While some of her songs are submerged in a blue-ish, slo-mo haze, like her name suggests, others have a sound that is both indelible and difficult to neatly categorise. Taking cues from minimal, electronica, ambient and off-kilter pop, her own music feels greater than the sum of these parts, combining an unerring sense for space, detail and atmosphere with slow-motion melodies and heady, cosmic vocals to create something personal and truly unique.
Inspired by natural phenomena, Myriam Boucher merges the organic and the synthetic in her mesmerizing video music compositions, immersive projects, VJing and audiovisual performances. Her sensitive and polymorphic work explores the intimate dialogue between music, sound and image, transforming everyday landscapes into fantastical, living phenomena. Elements in her skin-tingling pieces can move in synchronization with waves of sound, and very fluidly shift from solid to liquid, fragment to flood, plastic to plasmic.
A keyboardist turned visual artist working on the real-time dialogue between music and images, Boucher initially gravitated towards classical piano, jazz and then post-rock, before learning about, and then academically pursuing electroacoustics. Her research in video music composition proposes a classification of image/sound relationships as a building block towards an eventual grammar of the genre. Boucher approaches video much in the same way as she did music composition, through a visual interface that sees her fleshing out digital timelines.
She is professor in composition and digital music at the Faculté de musique of Université de Montréal. Her research-creation activities integrate musical composition, improvisation, deep listening, sound ecology, site-specific creation, immersive technologies, and cross-disciplinary arts. Her research aims to understand and analyze the mechanisms of perception and representation in audiovisual works and multidisciplinary concerts integrating sound, music, image, and performers, with the perspective that art is a practice capable of transforming reality and generating new forms of sensitive representations.
