Ana Dall’Ara-Majek

Nano-Cosmos is a cycle of acousmatic pieces by Ana Dall’Ara-Majek dedicated to insects, small arthropods and microorganisms. The five works were composed between 2012 and 2017, in Montréal and in Ohain, Belgium, most of them for 16-channel systems, and are heard here in stereo reductions and remixes made in December 2017. Several were premiered or commissioned by the Distractfold Ensemble.

Akheta’s Blues models its structure on the repetitive song of the house cricket and is, by her account, one of her most tonal acousmatic pieces, with leitmotifs and sound families placed like desks in an orchestra. Diaphanous Acarina puts semi-transparent mites living along vine leaf veins under a musical microscope: drones for the veins, granular objects for the mites, sudden dynamic jumps for the zoom. Bacillus Chorus, premiered at the Darmstadt summer courses in 2016, treats polyphony as a bacterial colony in which sounds divide and contaminate each other. Pixel Springtail Promenade, commissioned by SeaM in Weimar, uses glitch, micro-montage and the scale-swap of a scientific “body swap” experiment to make the listener feel as small as a springtail.

Xylocopa Ransbecka, dedicated to Annette Vande Gorne, began when the composer went to the Place de Ransbeck to record the doors of Rumeurs and met an angry carpenter bee hiding in a wooden beam. The piece pairs that bee with twenty doors recorded at Musiques & Recherches and received a mention at Ars Electronica Forum Wallis 2018.

Born in Paris in 1980 and living in Montréal, Dall’Ara-Majek studied in France with Christine Groult and Philippe Leroux, and in Québec with Robert Normandeau, earning a doctorate in composition from the Université de Montréal in 2016. She also performs as thereminist and electronic musician.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 18148, 2018.