Léa Boudreau

Limaçon collects five works by Léa Boudreau, composed in her Montréal studio between 2017 and 2022. Most of them follow a process or a transformation through time: an illness, a recovery, an evolution, a child’s idea turned into sound. The album runs 42 minutes.

Dementia (2017) is a musical representation of the course of Alzheimer’s disease, degradation and incoherence gaining ground stage by stage; it won 3rd prize in the Hugh Le Caine Award of the SOCAN Foundation. Impromptu[e], for eight channels, works with cello material recorded by her old friend Lara Laverdure and the emotion of meeting again. Recovery (2018), with the voice of Gabrielle Cloutier, traces a long and difficult path back to health and won 3rd prize at the SIME competition in Lille. Quatre machines pour sauver le monde (2019) grew out of a brainstorming session with young students at the Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur school in Montréal: each of its four sections carries the students’ own title, from a flying machine that turns pollution into clean air to a boat-submarine that cleans the oceans. Mini-bestiaire pour la fin du monde (2022), commissioned by empreintes DIGITALes, draws on speculative evolution to imagine three species adapting beyond the Anthropocene: giant, colourful peppered moths, stinky walking miniature trees and pollution-resistant long-legged aquatic anoles.

Born in Prévost, Québec, in 1993, Boudreau is a composer and sound artist who also designs electronic circuits and immersive environments. Her works often place people in front of hybrid creatures, such as robots with animal traits, to question the relations between human and non-human beings.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 23184, 2023.