fluff
Marla Hlady & Éric Chenaux
Artists Marla Hlady and Eric Chenaux are pursuing their collaboration with vinyl album fluff.
Artists Marla Hlady and Eric Chenaux are pursuing their collaboration with vinyl album fluff, an unprecedented creation produced in duet from experimentations they call “field-performance-recording”. The proposed tracks, from hybrid practices somewhere between music and sound art, are the result of a residency at Avatar in June 2017, during which they explored the acoustic and poetic properties of specific locations, such as a gymnasium or a shelter in the forest.
Marla Hlady work moves across and in-between sculpture, site, performance, kinetics, sound art and music performance. Hlady is interested in how media variously function, systematically and culturally, and how these functions can be critically and productively re-imagined. She’s shown widely in solo and group shows including SFX Seoul 2019, Manif D’Art 6 (Quebec City’s biennale), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), Oakville Galleries (Canada), YYZ Artist’s Outlet (Canada), Klink and Bank (Reykjavik, Iceland), New General Catalog (Brooklyn), Apexart Gallery (New York), Museo di San Domenico (Imola, Italy), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Canada), Nunnery Gallery (London, England). She has mounted site works in such places as the fjords of Norway, a defunct grain silo (Meaford, Canada), a tour bus (Ottawa, Canada). Hlady also collaborates. Recent collaborations include artist Christof Migone, musician Eric Chenaux, choreographer-dancer Shannon Cooney, the cross-disciplinary collective thirtyminutes.
Eric Chenaux is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven solo albums of experimental song on the Montréal-based imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk, out-jazz and pop composition, increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. He has been called “a musician like no other” by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo albums praised by The Quietus as “stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time.” Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: “Chenaux succeeds in generating an astonishing array of timbres. A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos.”
