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FREE OPEN REHEARSAL Friday, November 18; 2-3:30pm with musica intima and Erin Gee
For this fifth edition of Vancouver New Music’s PARALLELS series, Montreal-based artist and composer Erin Gee partners with vocal ensemble musica intima, pianist Andrea Wong and other local artists to present Affect Flow.
Affect Flow is a concert of work by that includes three pieces by Gee – a version of her solo piece, We as Waves, Song of Seven (2016) performed by musica intima and Andrea Wong, and Intimacy Alphabet, a new ASMR-based piece that will emerge from a workshop with seven community members.
Affect Flow features hypnotic gestures, live biosensor feedback, imaginative script writing, choral performance by musica intima, and original electroacoustic music. Through her work in music and new media art, Gee probes interior experience as an automatic, unconscious, and sensual material, likening the vibrations of vocal chords to the channeling of electricity across her electronic biofeedback systems, or the feeling of an emotion spreading across the room.
Gee has been exploring the way that emotion manifests in the body and can be “read” by emotional data systems for a decade, translating sympathetic emotional reactions in real time to sonic textures that evolve through analysis of BPM, blood flow, skin conductivity, and gentle shifts in respiration. Through this work, Gee combines her idiosyncratic performance style with technologies commonly used in lie-detection tests as a means of structuring sensually layered electroacoustic music. Through these unlikely combinations of technology, hypnotic suggestion, and emotion, Gee makes palpable the ways that emotional space is shared, experienced, and unconsciously processed through music.
In Song of Seven (2016), members of the choir musica intima lay bare their emotional memories of childhood through seven solo vignettes, within which the affective reactions of the choir are woven into the work through Gee’s BioSynth devices.
Gee’s newest work is influenced by the cool, algorithmic intimacy of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos, within which she melds whispers, taps, and various sonic and visual “triggers” into electronic music. Through works such as We as Waves (2021), Gee provokes intimacy in gentle, pleasurable, and sometimes psychologically dark and humorous ways.
musica intima: Tabitha Brasso-Ernst, Oliver Dalton, Sarah Jo Kirsch, Steve Maddock, Carman J. Price, Lucy Smith , Risa Takahashi, featuring Andrea Wong, piano.
ASMR Choir members: Lisa Butel, Cheryl Hutchinson, Helena Krobath, Keith Lawrence, Sotirios Papavasilou Jami Reimer and Gordon Tao.
Erin Gee is a Canadian artist with a hybrid practice that spans new media, art-science, performance art and music composition. Driven by her desire to enact speculative systems of feminist thought through expanded musical contexts, she creates new technologies, instruments and scores that address the material limits of embodiment, unconscious drives and affect-driven experience. Drawing upon the textural intimacy and detail of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), Gee creates sensually layered music in that merges electroacoustic music with engaging vocals that directly address the listener.
As a maker, Gee is a DIY expert in affective biofeedback, developing her own sensor systems to implicate the body of the listener in her imagined cyborg systems of togetherness. Her work in vocal composition, networked performance, ASMR, VR, AI and robotics has been presented internationally at venues such as Akousma (CA, 2021), Networked Music Festival (2020), LEV Festival (ES, 2020), MUTEK (CA/ES/AR, 2020-2021), Elektra Festival (CA, 2019), Toronto Biennale (CA, 2019), and Ars Electronica (AT, 2018).
As an academic, Gee was awarded a limited-term Assistant Professor contract at Concordia University (2015-2017) to teach in the areas of Sound Production and Gender and Technology studies. She is currently a doctoral student of music composition at Université de Montreal. Her research on feminist methods for biofeedback music is generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and is co-supervised by Nicolas Bernier and Jonathan Sterne. Gee’s musical collaborators have included Andrea Young, Simon Coovi-Sirois, Liz Lima, Jen Kutler, Jeff Morton, Phth choir, and the Hamilton Children’s Choir. She is currently the artist in residence at Institut Quantique (University of Sherbrooke, Quebec) for 2021-2022, co-hosted through Sporobole artist-run centre.
From grass-roots beginnings to international renown, pushing the boundaries of traditional choral performance and new perspectives on ensemble singing has made musica intima one of Canada’s most unique vocal ensembles. A shared leadership model allows the singers to exchange ideas freely while exploring their own musical creativity, and this freedom leads to dynamic performances where the ensemble engages with the audience directly and spontaneously.
Over the past thirty years, musica intima has commissioned twenty new works from Canadian composers and has championed contemporary Canadian vocal repertoire around the country and across the world. musica intima has released ten commercial recordings, received two JUNO nominations, and one Western Canadian Music Award.
Recent and upcoming highlights include collaborations with international superstar vocalist Bobby McFerrin (2019), Kenyan-Canadian spoken-word artist Germaine Konji (2021), Indigenous choreographer Olivia C. Davies (2022), Indigenous painter Sonny Assu (2022), and composer of Cree descent, Andrew Balfour, in the premiere of his project Nagamo (2022).
Nagamo is musical reimagining of first contact between the “Old” and “New” worlds through the translation of Elizabethan motets into Cree and Ojibway, which will be released as a CD, and toured and workshopped with youth choirs across Canada in 2023.
