For over 30 years, starting in the early 1980s, Pierre Ouellet and Jim MacDonald have enjoyed a unique and productive musical relationship. Originally, their work together focused on the commissioned creation of electronic soundtracks for radio, educational television and film. During this period, Pierre and Jim also continued to pursue their own musical interests and they found a home at Mars Studios in Toronto that would allow the creative space and time necessary to experiment with all manners of composition and performance in a sophisticated technological environment. Over time, the company itself transformed, in the early 21st century, into a production environment oriented almost uniquely to the personal and collective creative pursuits and interests of Ouellet and MacDonald. And the years of creative musical and sound experimentation had opened up numerous paths that could now be explored.
Toronto – circa 1978
The first manifestation of this new approach was the creation of Semiotek, a project whose original expression were three albums that were conceived under this brand as an integrated artistic and aesthetic statement about the relationship between art and technology. Over several years, and as the technologies evolved and changed, Brave The New World, Dream-less and Time is the Machine were themselves transformed into the current musical statements which offer a sobering meditation on a world struggling to reclaim itself amidst the increasingly meaningless noise of the mass media at the service of corporate and ideological ideals and imperatives.
The Elemental Spirits and Living Memory projects followed a different creative intuition and involved a fluid compositional and production process wherein the musical contributions of either individual were always subsumed to the thematic ideas from which each piece arose, as a meditation
In this sense, the sparse and, at times austere, chamber orchestra arrangements of Elemental Spirits can be contrasted with the more complex and articulated musical expressions of Living Memory as each project travels along a different musical path, while retaining the introspective qualities of sonic meditation of its original intuition.
The Artists
Over the past 30 years, Pierre Ouellet has written the music for numerous award winning television programs and series. As well, he has arranged and produced experimental, avant-garde, dance music and a large number of children’s albums. Lifeworldsound presents, for the first time in finished form, several of the musical pathways and intuitions pursued by Pierre Ouellet over this career.
Jim MacDonald is a musical child prodigy who gained success as a keyboard player in the 70s with Juno nominated band Rational Youth. Over the years, he has composed the music for many television programs with Pierre Ouellet and they have been musical writing partners for 35 or more years and counting.
Codec 13 signalled the return, for both composers, to a foundational aspect of their musical identities, grounded in the synthesizer-based, heavily sequenced music that was one of their seminal compositional influences. Both Jim and Pierre were present at the very beginnings of the genre, before computer sequencer programs, when all equipment was not only analog, but required extensive manual programming and complex sound and signal routing that was, at best, a nightmare to perform outside of the studio setting, and at worst, simply impossible replicate, making each performance and set-up a unique moment.
Lightform
LIGHTFORM represents Tim Darbyshire’s return to music-making. Structured and rhythmic, LIGHTFORM music builds on familiar relaxed rhythms and adds to the sound palette with warm analog vintage tones. Infused with melody, the intricate tapestry of electronica weaves with sounds that recall the past as well as indicating the future.
db electronica
db electronica was formed in early 2020 by Tim Darbyshire and Pierre Bouchard, renowned electroacoustic musician. The duo met for weekly sessions throughout the year and their musical journey, somewhat interrupted by the pandemic in early 2020, resulted nonetheless in two live open-air gigs in Wellington, Ontario. db electronica’s singular musical focus remains the performance of real-time events and they eagerly await more temperate weather for these to resume in 2021.
