Marc Tremblay

Bruit-Graffiti collects six works for tape that Marc Tremblay made between 1989 and 1998, in Montréal, Budapest, Bourges and his studio in Matane. Their common ground is noise, the accidental and bothersome sound of daily life, which Tremblay spent years listening to before hearing its expressive potential. He composes with objects that transmit sound, scratching at clean surfaces the way graffiti covers walls.

Vroum (1997) offers a deliberately anecdotal new way of hearing the automobile, the object that has come to dominate the soundscape of towns and countryside. Conte sous la lune (1991), begun at the electronic music studio of Magyar Rádió in Budapest, is a three-part homage to childhood and to its naivety. Résidus (clip dadaïste) plays with washroom sounds as an ironic nod to Marcel Duchamp’s Fontaine. Cowboy Fiction, realized at the IMEB in Bourges, is part of the multimedia project Rêve de cowboy on the myth of the West: its material comes from the French soundtracks of Howard Hawks’s El Dorado and John Ford’s The Searchers, singer Jo New York’s version of Rambling Man, locomotives and guns. «… Ceci est un message enregistré…», commissioned by ACREQ, explores the telephone, its rings, dead air and anonymous voices, against a background of loneliness. L’argent… toujours l’argent! treats money as sound and as an object of desire, from the Montréal Stock Exchange to game shows; it won first prizes at the PROCAN and CBC young composers’ competitions in 1990.

Born in Baie-Comeau, Québec, in 1960, Tremblay studied percussion in Chicoutimi, then composition and electroacoustic music with Clermont Pépin, Jacques Faubert and Yves Daoust at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. He has worked with the improvisers Martin Tétreault and Michel Ratté.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9949, 1999.