[Jeu de temps / Times Play 2024]
Prizewinners and Thematic Award Recipients
25th Jeu de temps / Times Play
Results | Artists and Submissions | Events | Awards | Jury
For each edition of JTTP, a broad and diverse international jury takes on the task of judging all submissions to the project. The creators of the top five selected works receive prize packages. Cash prizes are given to the first-, second- and third-place prizewinners, and to the thematic award recipients. JTTP Project Partners, Donors and Media Partners are listed on the Prizes and Awards page.
Over the course of the 2024–25 year, the selected works from JTTP 2024 (below) are presented in several Events, Concerts and Radio Broadcasts coordinated in collaboration with JTTP Media Partners. On the Artists and Submissions page you can listen to all works submitted to this year’s edition of JTTP and read the programme notes and artist biographies.
Results
JTTP Prizes
- Dominic Sambucco — re.azioni (2023 / 5:48)
- Mikael Meunier-Bisson — musicfriend (2024 / 8:18)
- Michael Lukaszuk — Obsession (2024 / 6:32)
- Alejandro Sajgalik — Novae I (2024 / 10:48)
- Alex Matterson — Firmament (2024 / 9:00)
Thematic Award Recipients
- Hildegard Westerkamp Award for soundscape and sound installation
Findlay Sontag — Pushpull (2024 / 7:35) - Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux Award for self-identified female or non-binary electroacoustic artists
Marie-Andrée Pellerin — Close Conversations of Other Kinds (2022 / 11:00) - Jean Piché Award for videomusic, new media and creative coding
Dominic Sambucco — re.azioni (2023 / 5:48) - Martin Gotfrit and Martin Bartlett Award for live electroacoustic practices
Nicolas Bourgeois — Nœuds au ventre (2024 / 9:47) - Barry Truax Award for environmental or ecological audio practices
Rob Gill — HPB9: composition 2 (2024 / 19:12) - Yves Gigon Award for the most outrageous electroacoustic work
Philippe Macnab-Séguin — Gone for Eggs (2024 / 23:30) - jef chippewa Award for Indigenous cultural background
sylvi macCormac — Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut (2024 / 8:06), an echo acoustic portrait
Biographies and Programme Notes
Nicolas Bourgeois • Rob Gill • Michael Lukaszuk • sylvi macCormac • Philippe Macnab-Séguin • Alex Matterson • Mikael Meunier-Bisson • Marie-Andrée Pellerin • Alejandro Sajgalik • Dominic Sambucco • Findlay Sontag
Nicolas Bourgeois
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 Martin Gotfrit and Martin Bartlett Award for live electroacoustic practices.
Nicolas Bourgeois is an electroacoustic artist with a practice rooted in the performing arts who strives to bring forth queer realities through live pieces that redefine the relationship between movement and the audiovisual landscapes presented. Using the body as the primary object of creation, they explore how it can transform and interact with its environment. Bourgeois’ creative process, situated at the intersection of sound experimentation and contemporary dance, gives rise to works that are both deviant and intimate, utilizing sensors integrated into musical algorithmic systems. Originally from the Magdalen Islands (QC), Nicolas has been studying electroacoustics at Université de Montréal (Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang) since 2022.
Nœuds au ventre (2024 / 9:47)
Guttural automatisms and humanoid magnifications. The concept of individuation by Carl Jung refers to the process of integrating conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche to achieve psychological unity and self-realization. Through confrontation with the Shadow, it is possible to gain a fuller understanding of repressed aspects of the self. Thus, Noeuds au ventre (Knots in the Stomach) moves away from the tangible to focus more on the impulsive. This performance is a sensation, an exploration of the body’s intuitive pathways as an exploitable tool. Through meditation, an internal search for ways to deconstruct the body to retain only the anatomical signals it communicates. Taking inspiration from the art of Japanese bondage, or shibari (縛り), the intention is to offer a slowing down, a turning inward. In the intertwining of ropes, an invitation to contemplation.
Rob Gill
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 Barry Truax Award for environmental or ecological audio practices.
Rob Gill has been working independently as a media artist for nearly three decades now. His projects embody a range of media such as audio art, programming, installation, 3D computer graphics and animation, and painting, all of which work together as a means to reveal, study and explore aspects of the human psyche, in particular, the creative process itself. After attending Queen’s University in Kingston for his BFA (specializing in painting), he spent an extended period of time in Muskoka (Ontario) developing and establishing a consistent and coherent artistic direction and body of work. Now moving between Toronto and Muskoka, he presents his work both online on his website and in live venues. His interactive work invites participation which is then translated through processes that employ dynamic systems, complex systems and the like to generate real-time 3D computer animation with accompanying audio from which final audio works, videos, paintings and prints are produced.
HPB9: composition 2 (2024 / 19:12)
The interactive installation High Park Branches was developed using openFrameworks, SuperCollider, Blender and a Kinect sensor. This piece is a recording of the installation in action. Random branches found in Toronto’s High Park were replicated as proportionally accurate 3D models that occupied a virtual space projected on a large screen. As participants drew closer to the screen, winds scattered the branches. Collisions between the branches triggered audio samples to generate this spontaneously formed audio composition. The final configurations of branches were made into paintings and prints as well. The branches are used as materials from which the character and quality of the park and surrounding area may be obtained as audio and visual artwork documents. The installation itself serves as a “branch player”. The system developed in the software to translate participants’ actions into forces that acted upon the branches employed self-organizing criticality.
Michael Lukaszuk
JTTP 2024 Third Prize winner.
Michael Lukaszuk is an electroacoustic music composer and researcher based in Umeå (Sweden). Much of his creative and scholarly output involves the use of algorithmic / generative procedures, improvisation and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to contemplate algorithmic media in culture and reflect on themes such as liveness and instrumentality. He regularly presents his work at electroacoustic music and media art events, including ICMC — International Computer Music Conference, SEAMUS — Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States, ISEA — International Symposium on Electronic Art, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and Now Hear This (New Music Edmonton). In 2015, he won First Prize in the Hugh Le Caine Awards from the SOCAN Foundation. He is currently based at Umeå University, where he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in New Media Art.
Obsession (2024 / 6:32)
Obsession is an electroacoustic composition that blends algorithmic and acousmatic practices. The recorded source material comes from live guitar improvisations. These sounds are increasingly juxtaposed with synthesized material that ranges from FM approximations of a plucked string to more sophisticated AI-based “timbre transfers” in which the model is trained on sounds from the same recorded instrument. Through abstraction, hybridization and synthesis of actual and virtual instrument sounds, this piece contemplates the idea of “liveness” in fixed media. This is also supported by mixing found sounds made through performance with different guitar tropes (tapping, strumming effects, etc.) that are realized using algorithmic techniques.
sylvi macCormac
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 jef chippewa Award for Indigenous cultural background.
sylvi macCormac began composing Wheels Soundscapes: Voices of People with Dis Abilities at SFU and VAMS in 1998. She received an international Honourable Mention in France in 1999 for the composition Waves of Kokoro, screened the documentary Patience & Absurdity in London during the 2012 Paralympics, co-produced The Feather (songbook and CD) with Dave Symington at VAMS in 2016, and acted in the Canadian feature film Bella Ciao! in 2018 and the CBS series Charmed in 2021. With the assistance of Bryden Veinot (VAMS), macCormac composed the echo acoustic portrait Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut, which received the jef chippewa Award for Indigenous Cultural Background in JTTP 2024, coordinated by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).
Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut (2024 / 8:06)
Stat’liam Lil’wat singer, drummer composer and producer Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut tells us of the impacts of music and colonization upon family and community. sylvi macCormac composed this echo acoustic portrait with stories, soundscapes of the Coast Salish Territory (Canada) and excerpts of music produced by Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut over 40 years.
Philippe Macnab-Séguin
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 Yves Gigon Award for the most outrageous electroacoustic work.
Philippe Macnab-Séguin is a composer of instrumental, electroacoustic and mixed music whose work aims to create a new musical language at the crossroads of popular and contemporary classical music, reflecting his eclectic musical background as a metal / punk / jazz electric guitarist, konnakol and Carnatic music lessons with Ghatam Karthick, barbershop singing and arranging, and his study of hyperglitch music production with the producer Woulg. He and producer Nicolas Gaumond form the prog-pop duo Greetings from the Hole. His in-depth study of aural sonology, the frequent presentations and workshops he gives on the subject, and his contact with Lasse Thoresen help ground his artistic research in clear perceptual principles. He has received over 20 scholarships and awards for his work, including the Prix d’Europe, a BMI award and four SOCAN Young Canadian Composers Awards, as well as funding from the SSHRC and FRQSC. He received his DMus in composition from McGill University under the supervision of Jean Lesage.
Gone for Eggs (2024 / 23:30)
“Just as life gestates in the egg, so in ancient healing rituals would initiates withdraw into a dark cave or hole to ‘incubate’ until a healing dream released them reborn into the upper world, in the same way the chick crawls out of the egg.”
—The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS).
Every night, we experience a small taste of death when we lose consciousness in the depths of sleep. Every morning, we are born anew. Gone for Eggs takes this fundamental experience as a starting point to explore the oscillation between day and night, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death.
Texts: Philippe Macnab-Séguin and Nicholas Papaxanthos. Portions of The Book of Symbols (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) were included in movements iii, iv and vi with permission from Allison Langerak Tuzo, director of ARAS.
Alex Matterson
JTTP 2024 Fifth Prize winner.
Alex Matterson is a composer, improviser and performer currently based in Victoria (Canada). In her work she explores a range of genres, from jazz to pop to Western art music. Her music seeks to reflect the experience of a monolithic structure: up close one can perceive an abundance of small details, while from further away these details can seem to blend into one uniform structure. Her music has been described as being like “a bird on an oil tanker” and its experience likened to “staring at a wall.”
Firmament (2024 / 9:00)
Firmament aims to represent just that, a massive wall holding up the heavens. The listener is but a tiny speck at the bottom of a massive wall, too momentous to be fully comprehended by the human eye. Even the massive walls buttressing the skies reveal tiny details when one examines them up close, small blemishes that are exposed upon closer inspection.
Mikael Meunier-Bisson
JTTP 2024 Second Prize winner.
Mikael Meunier-Bisson is a Montréal-based experimental and electroacoustic music composer. Around 2020, his compositional focus shifted to explore the realms of ambient and textural music. This self-taught practice quickly became more intricate in recent years as he flirted with acousmatic techniques. His current work aims to transcend the “locality” of ambient music by engaging with the “global,” to explore tonality in an abstract way, and ultimately reach emotional resonance through combinations of methods that may still be unfamiliar to us. Since 2023, he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Musiques numériques at Université de Montréal. Composed under the teaching of Martin Bédard, his 2024 work, musicfriend, earned him second place in the 25th edition of the Jeu de temps / Times Play competition, coordinated by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).
musicfriend (2024 / 8:18)
Arising as the outcome of frank encounters between several frames, musicfriend is the culmination of many reorganizations. Infused with a suggestive and strongly accentuated materiality, the rhetoric of this project is strewn with doubts, trials and errors, in a continual vacillation between the referential, the dreamlike and the playful.
Marie-Andrée Pellerin
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux Award for self-identified female or non-binary electroacoustic artists.
Marie-Andrée Pellerin is a multidisciplinary artist from Montréal based in Linz (Austria). Her artistic projects deal with language-related themes and are inspired by science fiction literature, acoustic territories and experimental phonetics. She works with video art, sound installation and performance, as well as textile art (tufting). She is currently working with the wind and air as a sonic medium, following a residency at Café Tissardmine, in the Moroccan desert. Her work has been presented in various art spaces such as Kunstforum (Vienna), Kunstraum Lakeside (Klagenfurt), BPS22 Museum (Charleroi), Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana), D21 Kunstraum (Leipzig), Scriptings (Berlin) and 5020 (Salzburg), as well as Ada X and CIRCA Art Actuel in Montréal. She has taken part in residencies in South Korea, Morocco, France and Mexico, among other countries. Pellerin is a doctoral candidate at the Art University of Linz, where she was also a guest lecturer in 2020–21, and is also involved in the artist-run space bb15.
Close Conversations of Other Kinds (2022 / 11:00)
Close Conversations of Other Kinds is a sound art installation project comprising four sound compositions that explores the possibilities of conversations between different species through the concept of “flat ontologies”. It consists of four short sound compositions inspired by science fiction stories written specifically for this project by Monika Rinck, Christiane Vadnais and Élisabeth Vonarburg, as well as a short story by the author Ursula K. Le Guin. The stories have been translated into sound art compositions, some of which are abstract while others are narrative. The project also includes visual components: a large, tufted carpet and an artist’s publication comprising texts written by the authors. The project was first presented in 2022 at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana (Slovenia) as a 4-channel sound installation, and later at the Art Quarter Budapest in a stereo version through headphones placed on a carpet on which the public was invited to sit.
Alejandro Sajgalik
JTTP 2024 Fourth Prize winner.
Alejandro Sajgalik is a choreographer and composer based in Montréal. His work explores our metaphysical uprootedness and the bewitching power of technology. Coming from a background in architecture, he has begun creating stage works that combine dance, electroacoustic music and a dramaturgy inspired by epics and mysticism. In Montréal, he has presented his solos N’importe où hors du monde (2018), Cantos para los insaciables (2019) et Materia Prima (2022). Nova Express, a full-length work for six dancers and a dismantled organ, will premiere in November 2024 at Tangente. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. He is currently studying electroacoustic composition at the Conservatory of Music of Montréal with Louis Dufort.
Novae I (2024 / 10:48)
For this electroacoustic sonata for dismantled organ and voice I breathe new life into a set of organ pipes recovered from a deconsecrated church in Québec. Freed from the weight of its past, the instrument and my voice intertwine in a counterpoint of fluid nervousness. Caught in the storm of time, I renew the sound material through my breath and my gestures to form lines of ecstatic life force. NOVAE I is an ode to the potential for re-enchantment.
Dominic Sambucco
JTTP 2024 First Prize winner and recipient of the JTTP 2024 Jean Piché Award for videomusic, new media and creative coding.
Dominic Sambucco is an Italian-Canadian sound artist, composer, and film-maker. He holds a degree in electroacoustic composition from the Université de Montréal and a diploma in modern guitar from the Music Academy of Rimini. Through electroacoustic music and multimedia art projects, he consistently seeks to push the boundaries of conventional artistic expression. His æsthetic is inspired by nature and science, and is characterized by the innovative use of acoustic instruments and new technologies. He has collaborated with such prominent organizations as the Montegral Academy, Oscillator Ensemble, Sonitus and the AAMOD archive, while his work has been featured in various festivals such as Aeson, Ruina Sonora, University of Greenwich, Suns, Unarchive, Inniò and Ibrida. Sambucco has won first prizes in the GroundSwell Emerging Composer Competition and the SOCAN Emerging Screen Composers Awards.
re.azioni (2023 / 5:48)
re.azioni is an experimental short film created from archival footage of the Audiovisual Archive of the Democratic and Labour Movement (AAMOD [Italian: Archivio Audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico]). The film is based on a dialogue between two types of images: colourful nature documentaries and black-and-white shots of hands and faces. The film is about creation and perception, but leaves many paths of interpretation open. In addition to the meanings that any viewer might find, discover or perceive, it is an invitation to contemplation, listening and feeling. The film is divided into three parts, each depicting a primordial component of the Earth.
Findlay Sontag
Recipient of the JTTP 2024 Hildegard Westerkamp Award for soundscape and sound installation.
Findlay Sontag is a music producer, sound artist and experimental composer from Calgary, now living in Montréal. His electroacoustic work draws on a broad span of themes, techniques and musical influences, often exploring the blending of acoustic and electronic source materials, realism and surrealism, philosophy and spirituality. Prior to enrolling in the Electroacoustic Studies programme at Concordia University (Montréal), he spent several transient years doing seasonal forestry work in the remote Canadian wilderness and travelling abroad. The diversity of these experiences has informed the principal driving ambition behind his artistic practice, which aims to elicit an emotional response in the listener on a universal, human level that transcends language and cultural predispositions.
Pushpull (2024 / 7:35)
Intrinsic motion
Outer world, inner sanctum
Form and void arise.
Pushpull was conceived as a meditation, structured around deep breathing, on the polarity between the inner self and external world. The listener is invited to consider where one ends and the other begins.
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