Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay

Quatre Poèmes gathers four works that Pierre Alexandre Tremblay composed between 2014 and 2020, mostly in his studio in Huddersfield. He compares the album to a volume of poetry rather than a novel: the pieces share images and themes, but each has its own world, and long pauses separate them so that each can echo in the silence that follows. The booklet opens with a line by the playwright Sarah Kane about arranging the old so that it can be seen afresh.

Bucolic & Broken (2016-17) was composed for 28 channels at the University of Huddersfield’s SPIRAL lab and at Notam in Oslo, premiered at the BEAST FEaST festival in Birmingham and is heard here from its 2021 version. It is what he calls an anxious love song to the north of England in the Brexit era: protected moors, stone walls, converted factories, broken windows, and people for whom a cup of tea seems to put everything into perspective. nureinwortgenügtnicht1 [asinglewordisnotenough1], made partly at the electronic studios of the TU Berlin and premiered at the CTM Festival in 2015, is the theme of a cycle, in three movements on ways of defining: repetition, contemplation, logical development.

Tentatives d’immobilité, premiered on the Czech radio programme rAdioCUSTICA in 2017, is a musing on observing with curiosity the stream of ads, news and discoveries that compete for attention. Newsfeed (2018-20) goes the other way, “made of saturations” with few silences and many cuts, and uses the voices of a dozen fellow composers, among them Hans Tutschku, Alex Harker and Rodrigo Constanzo. Both received support from the FluCoMa project funded by the European Research Council.

Born in Montréal in 1975, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is a composer and performer on bass guitar and electronics, working between electroacoustic music, contemporary jazz, mixed and improvised music. He studied composition with Marcelle Deschênes and Jonty Harrison among others, and studio technique with Francis Dhomont and Robert Normandeau. He is Professor of Composition and Improvisation at the University of Huddersfield.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 21177, 2021.