MARIO GAUTHIER

Envoi...

2013

Biography

After founding the Société des concerts alternatifs du Québec (now known as Codes d’accès) in 1985, Mario Gauthier became a producer with Radio-Canada’s Chaîne culturelle, until its demise in 2002. Over this period, he produced over a thousand programs, including three hundred electroacoustic, sound art or new music concerts. He also produced some thirty radio pieces and made fifty recordings. For his work as a whole, he received a Prix Opus from the Conseil québécois de la musique.
Gauthier’s career is tripartite: he is an independent researcher in the field of new music, phonography and sound art; he is a sound artist (on occasion), notably with Theresa Transistor, an electroacoustic improvisational quartet (Prix Opus, Concert of the Year—electroacoustic and new music in 2006); and he is a professor of musical literature and sound design at the École de musique Vincent-d’Indy. Gauthier also has a number of sound art works to his credit, including Objets (re)trouvés (2009), a Sound excavation created for Avatar in 2009.

About the work

Envoi…
An envoi is a short closing stanza dedicating the poem to a patron or summarizing its main ideas. This is not exactly what this work refers to—although in some ways it does. Envoi... is constructed from a single—and singular—sound: data back-up from 1986 recorded on an audio cassette. In those days, each page was sent in real time to a computer via a cassette player. Faxes did the same thing, but faster. All this makes me think of the early days of Avatar, when we were still at that stage, or almost. E-mail was in its infancy, as was the Internet. We still sent each other faxes, and I wrote my letters on a Yamaha CX5M Music Computer with 32K memory… When I found this cassette, all this came back to me, and out of curiosity I retrieved its sent messages… Which make up this rather odd object in which everything ends up getting lost! As it does today, in fact, but in a different way.