James O’Callaghan

Espaces Tautologiques presents four acousmatic works by James O’Callaghan composed between 2011 and 2015, mostly in his Montréal studio. Three of them form a trilogy that imagines the bodies of musical instruments as resonant interior spaces; each can be performed with extra loudspeakers placed inside the instruments themselves. The album received the Opus Prize for album of the year 2016-17.

Objects-Interiors takes place inside a piano. Much of its material consists of impulse responses, bursts of noise that capture the reverberation of a space, and the piece moves from the real space of the instrument to other imagined interiors and finally to a surreal world where space, motion and sound blur; it won first prizes at Jeu de temps / Times Play and the SOCAN Foundation awards in 2013. Bodies-Soundings, realized partly at the Banff Centre, uses an acoustic guitar and a toy piano as loudspeaker cabinets for their own sounds and for others that contradict them, and won the 4th Musicworks contest. Empties-Impetus, commissioned by the Ina-GRM and completed in its Paris studios, approaches the instruments of the string quartet both as spaces and as bearers of the idiom’s historical weight.

Isomorphic, commissioned by Codes d’accès, belongs to another triptych built from the same environmental sounds, alongside two orchestral works; its sources keep transforming through metaphorical and morphological comparisons.

Born in Burnaby, British Columbia, in 1988, O’Callaghan studied with Barry Truax at Simon Fraser University and with Philippe Leroux at McGill University. He received the Canada Council’s Robert Fleming Prize in 2015.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 16140, 2016.