Complexité

Complexité is meant as a sequel to simplicité (2019). Where simplicité displayed a meticulously composed simplicity, Complexité displays the diametrical opposite, that is, an explicitly composed complexity. Simplicity and complexity are often noticeable on the structural scale of compositions, that is, how much is “happening” within a determined time span. simplicité was meant to be boring in that regard, having slim to no structural arc, raw material without form. It plays on the listener’s appreciation and judgment upon the music as being either interesting, or not interesting. Does complex mean interesting per se?
I composed this to raise and try to answer questions, but also because there’s a lot of fun things in there.
Is a reflection on the word simplicity vs complexity, play on the tipping points, when simplicity starts to be complex and vice and versa. Using my aesthetic tools, mass and complex spectral contents. But even with this material, what is apparently simple, starts to be complex in many ways, depending on how the listener direct their attention. Even simple ideas can have underlying complexity. Even seemingly sonically simplistic ideas can be complex in their reason to be. Simplicity and complexity are omnipresent, fluid, volatile, subjective and objective.
Studying complex musical gestures. Algorithms and instruments with electronics, custom interfaces, complex spaces. Intentional complexity as opposed to complexity that comes from the listener alone. The complexity is explicitly composed and provided.
What is simplicity without depth? Or what is complexity with depth? These are the ideas I am trying to convey through musical ideas. To create an album, a piece of art, that is too complex to be understood. How do you define simplicity other than comparing it to something more complex? Yet, the idea of complexity is so simple in essence...

Persian Surgery Dervishes

Composed 1971 by Terry Riley (1935*)
Electronic Organ: Sébastien Vaillancourt
Length: 30-60 minutes

Live performances

2018-10-10 EM4 | Adakemie der Künste Berlin, Germany
2019-02-29 Decibels Festival | Riga, Latvia
2019-03-23 KM28 | Berlin, Germany
2021-11-06 Klangwerkstatt Festival | Berlin, Germany

About the Piece

In 1971, as TERRY RILEY recorded the first performance of Persian Surgery Dervishes in Los Angeles, he had been, during the previous decade, greatly influenced by his master, the Indian Raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. He also had been composing mainly with tape, which greatly influenced his style by leading him to carry the tape aesthetic to the instrumental world.

This piece appeared as a product of those two contrasting approaches: the use of new technologies of the time coupled with a theological and transcending vision of the act of making music.

This purely improvised work has no notation, no score, and no performance indication but two recordings with different tempi, moods, and structures. This leaves us, in turn, with only a few indicative elements: the original motif (taken from his Keyboard Study #2 from 1968), the nature of his instrument – a Vox Supercontinental Combo organ with a single tape delay – and an ambiguous Dorian/Aeolian mode tuned in C just intonation.

This reveals the improvised and somewhat loose nature of the work and invites for a very personal interpretation. I for my self, adapted the technical setup to my more modern and maximalistic approach, using 3 delay layers, 8 loop recorders and a series of independant loudspeakers. I also included other motifs of my own. Since the work is essentially improvised, it has led to four very different performances and experiences for me and I suppose for the audience as well.

This work walks directly on the line between interpretation and composition. Is the interpreter in fact the composer of the work, since s/he has to reconstruct the work given only very little clues on how to do it? The piece could also be very well so differently interpreted to the point it’s not recognizable anymore.

That raises the question: then who is the author of the piece? Now, I’ve always been an advocate of crediting the original composer for his work. Although, I’ve always been challenged by people using several good arguments based on musical facts like, the performer has a lot of freedom in choosing the musical material, that is, actual pitches, rhythms, tempo and structure. One could argue it is a lot. Though this discards the fact that the starting motif is one from Terry Riley himself, and that the idea that one should improvise on this theme loosely given other musical parameters (mode, tuning, timbre, delay effect, approximate length) is also from him. This piece though, has always been an fun one to play, and an interesting one to discuss about.

Of course I’ve come to play this piece, not willing to imitate Terry Riley’s style, or wanted to make is as close as possible to the original, as it would be defeating the purpose anyway. I’ve played this piece numerous times, always laying delay chains onto different sets loudspeakers, from 6 up to 24.

Dialoge

Composed 1977 by Thomas Kessler (1937*)
For two European instruments, two extra-European instruments and two vocoders

About the Piece

Dialoge is a piece from Thomas Kessler composed in 1977 commissioned by the Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln. The work is composed for two European, two extra-European instruments and two vocoders. The piece had the purpose of establishing a dialog between extra-European and European musical traditions. It uses a vocoder for that purpose as a means of making musicians play with (through) one another. As every vocoder has two voices – one is a carrier, while the other is a modulator – both roles would be switched every now and then. The filtering nature of the vocoder mirrors the way we usually dialog with people from different cultures.
The piece is always played with different instruments from different musical cultures. The Berlin version was played with Instruments from Brazil, guitars, cello and bass flute.
My role as an audio designer, required a whole deal of my experience as a composer. Thomas Kessler was responsible for leading musicians in improvisation and getting beautiful material to work with. While I also helped him in his task, asking musicians for specific material, I was mainly responsible for getting a good sound out of this dialog. I programmed the vocoders from the ground up, using Max/MSP, and I was actually using it on stage.
The piece was recorded and edited by both of us and was then later broadcast offline during the online representation of the Memories in Music Event at the Akademie der Künste Berlin.

Offline Performance

Performed within the Memories in Music Festival (6–9th May and 6.–7. August 2021)
Dialoge, Berlin version for 2 European instruments, 2 Smetak instruments and two vocoders
Musical Direction: Thomas Kessler
Audio design, vocoder design and programming: Sébastien Vaillancourt
Ensemble: Jagdish Mistry (Smetak Instruments), Silvia Ocougne (Smetak Instruments), Dietmar Wiesner (Flute) and Eva Böcker (Cello)
Video: Susanne Elgeti

Live Coding with Max/MSP

Length: 25 minutes

Live performance

2019-09-18 Moozak #95 @ Au, Wien

simplicité

Released on 2019-04-01
Length: 4 minutes 33 seconds

Album Track Listing:

introduction #0 (0:33)
simplicité #0 (2:00)
complexité #0 (2:00)

About the Album

I had just gotten back from an semester abroad in Krakow Poland and had met there a wonderful professor who planted an idea in my head. Entropy in music. What it meant back then was still not very clear, but the concept had struck me. With this professor we would talk about John Cage, Morton Feldmann, black MIDI and Japanese minimalism. After the release of Maximum Intra in 2018 and some other pieces here and there, I had been criticized for my “[too] slowly evolving music”, that didn’t have a traditional development, a music where very little happened. The classes with this professor brought to light lots of questions regarding entropy and some other related concepts such as simplicity and complexity in music. This led me to write actual music, handling that matter.
I set out to write an album, a meticulously composed simplicity, nodding John Cage, that featured no structural arc nor development. Each piece is in fact raw material, white noise, one colourful but steady tone and a 3-second piano loop, each featuring a different point on an entropy gradient.
This music is composed of raw and rather uninteresting material, meaning that the listener is encouraged to forcibly seek interesting aspects in something that is generally acknowledged as uninteresting and feature-less.
I played simplicité #0 live several times wishing every time to play with the audience’s nerves and to lead them to reflect upon their limits. When does a listener will stop listening? When is a listener starting to think what they’re listening to is unmusical? It is the listener’s choice to get angry, annoyed, amazed or disgusted. It is though a study in listening.
The album was meant as a prequel to another later album dealing with its counter idea: complexity. While simplicité was made on purpose to be simple and deliberately uninteresting, Complexité will be composed so that it is overwhelmingly interesting, whatever that means.

Live performances

23.03.2019 simplicité #0 - KM28 Berlin, Germany
05.05.2019 simplicité #0 - Berliner Lautsprecher Orchester | HfM “Hanns Eisler” Berlin, Germany

Chess Game

Length: 8 minutes

Live performances

2019-01-11 Concert Hall of the Academy of Music in Krakow
Performer: Sébastien Vaillancourt, sensors and programming

Am Boden zerstört

Length: approx. 7 minutes

Live performances

2018-12-19 Concert Hall of the Academy of Music in Krakow
Performer: Sébastien Vaillancourt, electronics

Trio A (A oirT)

Composed in 2018 by Sébastien Vaillancourt (*1988)
Choreography: Zoe Goldstein, Netta Weiser
Length: approx 12 minutes

About the Piece

A oirt is a multi-disciplinary piece for dancer with motion sensor, video and loudspeaker orchestra. It is based on the interaction between the live dancer, the music s/he produces and the video footage. This interplay builds up by establishing a clear relationship between the dancer and the video, by first showing the dancer following the video closely to then depart from it on several occasions. The music then builds up until the dancer seems to be taking control of the video by destroying its material with use of a very noisy and incisive music, produced with help of the motion sensor. The piece ends the moment the performer is alone enjoying his/her liberty.
The video footage is from Yvonne Rainer, who choreographed a performance called Trio A in 1966. She then performed it for the camera in 1978. Written for a solo performer, it features no music and consists of a seamless flow of repeated everyday movements. This stripped-down, casual choreography was considered ground-breaking in its time, and placed Rainer prominently in the history of Western contemporary dance.
Taking Trio A as raw material, Zoe and I investigated the musicality of this silent dance video artifact by reinterpreting it with music, both composed and produced live by the motion sensor. Through this reinterpretation of this choreographic score, Zoe and I posed the question of what it means to recompose this piece Trio A starting from its movements.

Live performances

2018-11-22 Kunstlicht I | Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" (Berlin, Germany)
Regie: Sébastien Vaillancourt
Dance: Zoe Goldstein

Maximum Intra

Released on 2018-11-01
length: 39’50”

Album Track Listing

Maximum Intra 1 (9:12)
Maximum Intra 2 (2:39)
Maximum Intra 10 (6:57)
Daydream-e (8:39)
Daydream 5 (8:32)
Maximum Intra 11 (3:47)

About the Album

I was approached to compose meditation music, I started to write this kind of music but in fact, I was very bad at it. Although it kind of went in the direction of slowly evolving music.
I used many techniques. Using a keyboard and tactile sensors as interfaces controlling synthesizers and sometimes a piano. The instrument behind Maximum Intra 1 and Maximum 11 was completely built by me on Max, from the ground up. I took harp recordings, extracted a single grain from each and looped a different grain for each key pressed.
All these techniques unconsciously led to a special sound that I had not really foreseen. The album ended up for me sounding like a voyage, a dream, a door into a surrealistic and nostalgic forgotten world. Something of a seed was already there though, the name of the album was chosen because it was an explosion of the word Mantra. Maximum Intra means for me to go at the deepest point inside. It meant going deep into a dream, an imaginary world.

Live Performances

2019-02-26 Daydream-e @ Decibels Festival (Riga, Latvia)
2019-01-19 Maximum Intra 1 @ Baza Club (Krakow, Poland)
2017-12-16 Daydream-e @ Berliner Lautsprecherorchester (Berlin, Germany)
2017-05-20 Maximum Intra 1 @ Berliner Lautsprecherorchester (Berlin, Germany)

Xn 2

Length: approx. 10 minutes
Instrumentation: IMU Motion sensor and Playback.

About the Piece

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Live Performances

2017-09-29 KONTAKTE '17 Festival | Akademie der Künste Berlin, Germany/br> Performer: Sébastien Vaillancourt, electronics

Fabulation 1b

Length: approx. 7 minutes

About the piece

Fabulation 1b is a generative solo piano piece. It was generated from the spectral analysis of a collage of different violin samples. The violin piece (Fabulation I) from which the samples are taken was originally composed a year prior to Fabulation 1b. The resulting piano chords are a MIDI translation of the overtones from the violin notes.
These chords were then put into time and space using several layers of reverb to give them different spacing and directionality. What was once a meditative violin piece, is now an explosion of overtones in space.

Xn

Length: 6 minutes

Live Performances

2016-06-29 Joseph-Haydn-Saal | Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Austria
Harp, Luise Adler, Elke Paternusch
Sampler, Sébastien Vaillancourt
2016-06-08 Orchesterstudio | Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, Austria
electronic version

Pas de Deux

for small ensemble, electronics and film
6 minutes 30 seconds

About the Piece

Pas de deux is an ensemble piece for 8 instruments and video. It was composed within a collaboration between the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Max Steiner Ensemble. It is Sébastien’s first piece ever composed and played in Europe. At his arrival in Vienna, Sébastien had been continuing his work ensembles using with micro-tonality. The piece uses different algorithms to dictate several aspects of the music. The most prominent algorithms can be heard in the piano using composed ritardandi and a lot of computer-generated patterns. It is also present in the harmonies. This piece is seemingly continuous flow of textures, bumping and blending into each other. The piece was originally composed to accompany a video called Pas de deux from Canadian animator and director Norman McLaren.

Live performances

2016-03 Joseph-Haydn-Saal | Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna, Austria)