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Press Release — For Immediate Release

Montréal, March 2008 — As part of his exploration of environmental electroacoustics, Robin Minard is presenting five recent works at OBORO, including Nature morte, a new creation with video components made with artist Susan Meinhardt. Since the beginning of the 1980s, Robin Minard has used the imponderable sounds and whispers of public spaces in his compositions. His often discreet sound installations take the morphology and vocabulary of places into account, such that a work presented in a park, a swimming pool or at Oboro is always embodied differently. In 1994, his Silent Music intervention, composed of hundreds of piezo transmitters laid out like climbing plants, began a dialogue which is reopened with new sites, visitors and everyday occurrences.

Robin Minard also cultivates a special relationship with silence, which is revealed in his choice of locations and the titles of his works, and above all, in the use of sound structures wherein silence becomes material. Among the elements in the exhibit, the pieces à lire en silence [to read in silence] and à voir en silence [to see in silence] create a climate of intimacy and listening, and tiny speakers are placed on notebooks or on sheets of handmade paper covered in writing. The sound objects made by Robin Minard with sounds on paper are part of what we might call “an ecological awareness of sound”, a delicate harmony which allows the artist to pursue “the fusion of art and life”.

As a counterpoint to the exhibit at Oboro, Robin Minard has been commissioned by Réseaux des arts médiatiques to take up composition once again and to give a multiphonic acousmatic concert as part of Pulsar *3, marked with poetry and transcending space and time. As an opening feature, a creation by Nicolas Bernier, the new artistic director of Réseaux, will be presented. After seventeen years of rigorous, daring and generous work, Jean-François Denis, Gilles Gobeil and Robert Normandeau are passing the torch to this young composer, a clear-sighted artist with a discerning ear and an inquiring mind capable of vision. www.reseauxconcerts.com

Pulsar *3 Concert Programme — April 14, 2008:

Nicolas Bernier (Québec): Les chambres de l’atelier (10min, 2008) [premiere]
Robin Minard (Canada, Germany): qu’il m’en souvienne… (11min, 1987) /-/ The Book of Spaces (36 min, 1998-2004) /-/ Diary for S. (12min, 2008) [premiere • commission: Réseaux des arts médiatiques, with support from the CCA]

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Robin Minard was born in Montreal in 1953. He studied music composition and electroacoustic music in Canada (at McGill University and the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal) and Paris (at Université Paris VIII). Since the early 1980’s a main part of his work has focused on sound installation in public spaces. His works have been presented in countless festivals, museums and public venues. From 1992 to 1996 he was lecturer on the subject of sound installation art at the electoacoustic studio of the Berlin Technical University. Since 1997 he has been professor for electroacoustic composition and sound design in Weimar, Germany at the Franz Liszt Academy and the Bauhaus University where he is also director of the Studios for Electroacoustic Music (SeaM). www.robinminard.com

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An Oboro / Réseaux des arts médiatiques collaboration.

Pulsar *3 is presented with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Heritage Canada, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the SOCAN Foundation.

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Media & journalists only, please contact: Caroline Loncol — caroline@oboro.net — 514-844-3250 extension 224

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