Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay

Alter Ego gathers five stereo works that Pierre Alexandre Tremblay composed between 1997 and 2004, in the studios of the Université de Montréal, the University of Birmingham, the University of Huddersfield and his own. Most were first heard in the Rien à voir concert series in Montréal or in concerts of BEAST in Birmingham. In his note the composer reads the title four ways: music as an accomplice, as an intimate and imperfect self-exposure, as a road others can wander, and as something beyond aesthetic seduction, Expressionist and Romantic. The album was a finalist for the Prix Opus 2006-07.

The earliest piece, fugue; qui sent le temps? (1997-98), is a three-part meditation on time, with epigraphs from Virgil and Ovid, that received a mention at Bourges in 1998 and third prize at the CBC National Competition for Young Composers. Binary (Virtual Rapper Remix) (1998) sets lines by the rapper Dice B, with drums worked on by Jean Sébastien Nicol, and was completely remixed in Huddersfield in 2005. The fifteen-minute au Croisé, le silence, seul, tient lieu de parole (1999-2000), the story of a battle, opens with a line by François Mauriac and shared first prize in the SOCAN Foundation’s Hugh Le Caine Awards in 2001.

In autoportrait (2001), commissioned for the tenth anniversary of Rien à voir, Tremblay looks back at his own sound images like a painter. la cloche fêlée (2004) follows Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet from serene quatrains to depressive tercets, using three bells of the Saint-Antonin church in Montréal.

Born in Montréal in 1975, Tremblay is a composer and bass guitarist working across electroacoustic music, contemporary jazz and improvisation. He studied with Marcelle Deschênes, Jonty Harrison and bassist Michel Donato, among others, and teaches composition and improvisation at the University of Huddersfield.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0680, 2006.