(credit: Maxime Corbeil-Perron)
by Andrew Adridge
What Maxime Corbeil-Perron’s works did for me was everything an experience of music is hoped to do. Creation of a state of being is something that I didn’t think that I would find in music and I have never journeyed anywhere to this extent with music. This wasn’t so much assimilating into an already established reality but a revelation into a new sense of my own reality. Never have I felt both so unbalanced but also so grounded and affirmed in my position. The visual aspects of the creation lend to a glimpse into the soul of the composer like no other. The beauty of new music is that you can still know today what that soul is and feels as it is ever-changing with each new composition. You can actually hear and see a soul in this music.
Electronic music is interesting for it can be suggested that its computerized components are not authentic. I found much the contrary to this notion in my listening. Each note, each phrase was met with a purposefulness that I would expect of any other composition. Everything is deliberate here and the environment is created through this deliberateness. Music of this nature, performed by its creator, I liken to what it must have felt like to have heard Mozart perform his own works. Not from a musical perspective really but rather the sublimity of unparalleled nature. Everything that the piece is, is the ideal of perfection from its creator, a rare privilege for our ears. I ask you all to listen with this notion in your minds throughout.
Coming to Maxime’s work with very little electronic exposure and with a classical ear, made me initially doubt the place I found myself in experiencing the music. Letting go of convention allowed me to succumb to what I was experiencing. It allowed me to feel whole in it. Leave your preconceived notions of what music is, should be, can be, sounds like, looks like, at the door and close it before you get into Maximes work. When I allowed myself that space, the result was mesmerizing.
(teaser video by Maxime Corbeil-Perron **watch with 3D glasses**)
My Impressions:
Disclaimer: I watched everything three times with 3D glasses. Once on a laptop with speakers and twice on a large monitor with noise-cancelling headphones. I wrote on each piece during the third viewing. I encourage you to explore different formats as well. These are the thoughts that came to me. They are raw and free from structure at times but I concluded that it would be dishonest to leave you with anything less than that. I have left the titles out to not inhibit your own experience.
When I first looked at the lights I took a glimpse into what I thought would be my undoing. I sense my own destruction and can see the inevitability of chaos in everything. I struggle with finding purpose in this but realize that that isn’t the point. There is an otherworldliness that I want to know more of; I want to go there, to the mountains. The beauty that nothing has to be anything here envelopes me, the need for constraints or organization in the chaos to harmony structure is obliterated. I question if I look up at the sky or down into a chasm of light. Chaos and harmony become one. I lose my sense of gravity. I am floating as the drone continues and eventually…fades. The lights brought me home.
There is an authenticity unparalleled in this music. It’s funny to think of creating a sound to what something looks like, I think briefly on what came first for Maxime but immediately I don’t want to know. I see a face staring at me with blinking crystal eyes, the earth trapped in a prison, or a prism, a system disrupted by an invader. I go in and out of states of harmony and states of chaos, the destruction of a system to make way for another disturbes me. What is the cost of our freedom? The destruction of another? Near the end the experience is overwhelmingly raw, I won’t tell you mine so you can have your own. There is static, diamonds, explosions. No harmony, we end in destruction.
Waiting, waiting as I watch the cubes rotate, they materialize as the mirror image of my eyes. The need to know what is happening again crosses my mind and I dismiss it. I struggle with the uncertainty of my own thoughts, the absence of them entirely. What lives in focus here, what is meant to be peripheral? I try to truly let go, lines dance in front of my eyes like brushstrokes. I am running through the sketchbook of Maxime’s mind. Then, nothing.
I quickly realize I can’t dwell on a need to understand what it is that I am looking at. This need often presents itself in the music I am more familiar with, I know it well. Letting go of that is hard, but so freeing when you can. I almost forgot that I was hearing sound. I feel like I was watching life go by, the sound was just a part of that life. There was no separation. Only a life lived.
Convergence Theory (digital edition) ft. Maxime Corbeil-Perron
July 23, 2020
8PM