CNMAT welcomes composer Olivier Pasquet for a special visit and presentation in the main room at CNMAT for Thursday, June 19, from 11:30-12:30. Free and open to the pubic.

Olivier Pasquet is a composer, music producer, and visual artist. His work is based on the writing of audiovisual compositions and synesthesias. His generative pieces are minimalistic and maximalistic at the same time and contextualized within rationalist theory-fictions. The latter can be deciphered through singular pieces or overall artistic research. The formal and plastic value of his work provides strong links with geometry, architectural, and algorithmic designs. His compositions can be sound-based, visual, or material. Olivier Pasquet first practices music writing on his own. After composition studies in Cambridge with Richard Hoadley, and lectures with Trevor Wishart and Iannis Xenakis, he works in several popular music studios and does a short visit at INA-GRM. He got his Ph.D. in musical composition and non-standard architecture at Huddersfield University with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. He orientates his work toward staged, contemporary music, and media art. He has collaborated with a wide variety of other artists mostly at IRCAM-Centre Pompidou for several decades. He confronts his sonic compositions with reality through performance art; dance, opera, music, and contemporary theatre. His pieces also materialize themselves in the form of plastic installations and purely electronic music. He played worldwide, and sometimes danced, in galleries, clubs, specific sites, or dozens of eminent international festivals. Olivier Pasquet taught interactive arts and computational design at Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, theater-music at Théâtre National de Strasbourg etc. He also has been a guest professor at the National Taiwan University of the Arts, the Hochschule der Künste Bern, and NY Buffalo University. He has been a researcher at Tokyo, Keio, and Buffalo Universities. He worked at Sony CSL and Ableton as a consultant, was a researcher at the Institute for Computer Music at the Zurich University of the Arts, and was part of the artistic machine learning European Flucoma research project. He is currently a faculty in computational arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. He received several prizes and residencies such as Villa Médicis, Tokyo Wonder Site, and Arcadi, both in Chili and Taiwan. He received the Creative Art Initiative for Frank Lloyd Wright and Toshiko Mori’s buildings in 2017. He got in 2021, Facebook prize “Momentum of Creation” in artificial intelligence.

Some people jokingly refer to my work as "Zukunft Musik". I find this amusing, as I am indeed exploring a naive yet human musical direction intended for a post-human or non-human audience. I therefore have a strong interest in symbolic, highly musical and spatial architectural composition.
My personal journey has taken me through opera, music theatre, hip-hop, and contemporary performance art. After numerous productions and a significant amount of time, I finally discovered a convergence between my aesthetic and the contextual constraints building compositional processes: human voice.
In some cases, I concentrate on text generation, plastic voice and personality, and the sharp micro-rhythms I always use. It is possible to explore these with a continuum between meaning and abstraction. Or maybe by using structures that eventually become lyrical. I can focus on aspects such as text generation, plastic voice, and personality.
Neural voice synthesis controlled at a low level enables me to compose by navigating between ineffable intermediate levels, oscillating between generated texts, expressions, prosodies, and sound without directly controlling those. The resulting outcome can be either politically charged or non-verbal, but more intriguingly, it often inhabits the liminal space between language and sound, utilising phonemes in a manner reminiscent of 1980s music-theatre.

www.opasquet.fr
instagram.com/o_pasquet