San Francisco Tape Music Festival
Saturday January 10, 2026 9:30pm
Tumultes (2024)
16’18” Stereo
What’s the way to you? Despite the dams, walls, censures and other verticalities that cut the horizon of everyday life, we must persist in seeking a way to you - here or elsewhere, near or far. Inspired by the works of Adania Shibli (Minor Detail) and Antoine Wauters (Mahmoud ou la Montée des eaux). Produced with the support of PRIM’s Research and Exploration program and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Monique Jean is always in search of raw, energetic sonic material, convinced that the materiality of sound provides access to sensation and meaning. Her interest lies in the forces, tensions, and imperfections of sound materials, which she uses to create a continuous metamorphosis of sound flow, like a complex and unstable organism that constantly transmutes from real to poetic.
She studied electroacoustic composition at the Université of Montréal and completed a PhD with Nicolas Bernier, developing a practice of improvisation using a low-fi analog setup under the name MissTake. She is a member of the improvisation quartet Theresa Transistor. Her activities also include collaborations for dance performance, art video and cinema.
Her works have been performed and broadcast at numerous national and international concerts and festivals including Multiphonies (Paris), Akousma (Montréal), Sonorities (Belfast), NYCEMF (NewYork), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Festival Ai-Maîao (Chile), Elektra (Montreal). She was a guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy.
Her music is published by Empreintes digitales.
From Hemlock, the Menagerie Fades (2025)
12’51” Stereo
From Hemlock, the Menagerie Fades is an audio collage built from three earlier works—Picker (2015), In Hemlock (2017), and Menagerie of Bounds (2018). Drawing on material a decade old, the piece reframes these fragments as sonic artifacts: fading memories, partial remains, and echoes from a world that never fully arrived.
Nathan Corder is an Oakland-based composer of works for electronics, objects, and arrays of people. Corder’s music has been honored and programmed at events such as the International Symposium of New Music (Brazil), Le festival International des Arts Sonores EXHIBITRONIC (Strasbourg), MUSLAB (Mexico City), Echofluxx (Czech Republic), mise-en music festival, NUNC!3, NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, N_SEME, Root Signals, the Yarn/Wire Institute, and SEAMUS. He received the Elizabeth Mills Crothers Award for music composition in 2018 from Mills College. In 2014, Nathan was awarded the Allen Strange Memorial award from SEAMUS.
His music has been described as both “something in common with the act of sowing seeds, digging, dragging, foraging, and repeating the process” (Toneshift), and “dizzyingly kinetic sonic events that constantly interlock and overlap… extreme computer music” (Noise Not Music).
Après, les cendres (2023)
15’00” Quadraphonic
Noir présage (2’25”)
Chants de mines (4’08”)
Mur des silences (3’25”)
Incandescente fureur (4’59”)
Après, les cendres is an acousmatic work freely inspired by the collection of poems “Pour les âmes” by Québécois author Paul-Marie Lapointe.
In first sections of the work, “ICBM” (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) evokes, among other things, humankind lulled by a false sense of security. The final section of the work begins with the fulfilled prophecy. The metaphor of sleep used in the text symbolizes an anesthetized conscience in the face of the unthinkable. Fate governs our existence, and its inevitability haunts our minds.
The final section of the work begins with the fulfilled prophecy. “A day of fury!” The incandescent dawn rises in the thrust of an implacable martial motif inspired by the poem “Nous sommes installés sous le tonnerre….”
The work concludes with the haunting pain left behind in the ashes of war, as perfectly expressed in this line: "les enfants se recroquevillent comme des feuilles brûlées" [children curl up like burnt leaves] (ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile]). We then witness the ascent of delicate, evanescent matter, freed from Earth's gravity, like shattered souls pursuing their infinite journey.
Après, les cendres was composed in 2023 at the composer's studio in Brossard, Québec, with financial assistance from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The work is part of the album released in 2025 under the empreintes DIGITALes label.
Stéphane Roy is an acousmatic composer. His art aesthetics allow him, after thorough experimentations with sound materials, to extract expressive properties and give these works teleological motion.
Roy holds a doctorate in electroacoustic composition and a PhD in musicology, both from Université de Montréal. He has written a number of papers and a book on the analysis of electroacoustic music (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2003), which earned him the 2003-04 Prix Opus — Book of the Year. His works have won several awards and mentions in national and international electroacoustic composition competitions. His latest album, L’inaudible, received the 2019- 2020 Prix Opus — Album of the year, Electroacoustic Music. His works have been programmed throughout Europe and the Americas. For the past few years, he has been featured by various international festivals who gave his latest works their European premiere. Some of his works also received their world premiere in concerts presented at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal (Québec).
Stéphane Roy is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC), and his works have been published on audio support by various labels, including empreintes DIGITALes (Kaleidos, 1996; Migrations, 2003; L’inaudible, 2019; Coups de Coeur, 2025).
- INTERVAL -
Sound Design Excerpts From Twin Peaks: The Return, “Episode 3” (2017)
4’30” 6 Channels
As early as Eraserhead, filmmaker David Lynch started making sounds himself when he couldn’t find what he wanted in the studio’s sound libraries, but it wasn’t until Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) that he took official credit of Sound Designer for the first time. Throughout the festival are excerpts of his dreamlike and disturbing sound design from episodes of The Return.
His process was characterized by a meticulous, experimental approach conducted in his private studio, "The Bunker," where he collaborated closely with sound supervisor Dean Hurley and Ron Eng. Most sounds originate from organic sources, such as wind or machinery, which are then pitch-shifted, equalized, or layered. Everyday sounds like room tones are treated with comb filters to create "unsettling disharmony" or melodic undertones. A dominant motif throughout The Return, electricity is used as an "amoral tool" for spirits. Sounds like electrical transformer hums were mapped over keyboards to create musical themes, such as the "Night Electricity Theme".
Lynch frequently employs thuds, whirs, and "malevolent drones" to create a sense of industrial dread, often placing these sounds in domestic settings where they don't logically belong. Contrary to the original series’ heavy use of music, The Return often utilizes long periods of silence or very distant, tension-raising hums to enhance the feeling of unease.
David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an iconic American filmmaker, painter, and musician known for his surreal, dreamlike, and often disturbing cinematic style, dubbed "Lynchian," blending the mundane with the macabre through meticulous sound design and bizarre narratives.
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, with his films often characterized by a distinctive surrealist sensibility that gave rise to the adjective "Lynchian". In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, and Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement posthumously in 2025.
Lynch studied painting and made short films before making his first feature, the independent body horror film Eraserhead (1977). He earned critical acclaim and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama The Elephant Man (1980), the neo-noir mystery films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). For his romantic crime drama Wild at Heart (1990), he received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the space opera Dune (1984), the neo-noir horror Lost Highway (1997), the road movie The Straight Story (1999), and the experimental psychological horror film Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC surrealist horror-mystery series Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017), for which he received nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Fog and Rails (2025)
22’21” 6 Channels
Fog and Rails is a quiet study of urban sound at the edges of night. Combining late-night recordings of distant San Francisco foghorns with echoing Oakland train horns as an approaching train emerges—building slowly, peaking in intensity, and gradually fading away. Parts of this augmented reality comprise eleven BART train passes recorded using an ultrasonic microphone capable of capturing frequencies up to 100kHz. Each of the eleven passes was stacked and spatialized to move through the sonic space from multiple directions. Transposition down by one, two, three and four octaves produces 55 layered trajectories at varying speeds. Each octave of transposition reveals more frequency detail, with the slowest layers resembling the deep, resonant textures of a metal foundry—uncovering sounds normally beyond human hearing.
Thomas Dimuzio is a San Francisco-based musician, composer, improviser, sound designer, mastering engineer, and music technologist whose work creates immersive and cinematic worlds. Described by Peter Marsh of the BBC as having a “narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining,” Dimuzio’s music transports listeners to otherworldly sonic realms.
His internationally acclaimed recordings have been released by renowned labels including ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, Drone Records, Odd Size, Sonoris and Seeland. Dimuzio has collaborated with a diverse array of artists such as Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Matmos, Joseph Hammer, Marcia Bassett, Negativland, 5uus, ISIS, and Voice of Eye, showcasing his versatility and collaborative spirit.
Dimuzio’s performances have been featured at prominent venues and festivals, including AngelicA Festival Internazionale di Musica, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, CCRMA at Stanford University, Recombinant Media Labs Buchla Memorial, and the Ende Tymes Festival of Experimental Art and Liberation.
As the former host of Frequency Modulation Radio on KPFA radio, Dimuzio spotlighted sonic innovators pushing the boundaries of experimental music. His current Sculpting Electric series features real-time compositions using the legendary Buchla 200 series Electronic Music Box.
Le ravissement (2021)
15’20” 10 Channels
The word "rapture" can be defined in two ways: the spiritual meaning of being transported to a supernatural world, and to ravish, or taking away of something. Musically, this piece borrows the idea of rolling, which is, on the one hand, a process of manufacture by plastic deformation and, on the other hand, figuratively, the action of reducing the importance of something or someone. What is distorted here is time. Time and spectra are stretched here beyond the thresholds of perception. And figuratively, what is reduced, what is ravished, is the identity of the musical sources used.
In 2018, I was invited to collaborate on the most recent project of singer and cellist Jorane. My composition work consisted of processing in real-time the musical material of the soloist, the singers, and the string quartet. It was a return to live electroacoustic for me, which had been at the heart of my first experiences and which I had neglected for the last thirty years...
This piece is the result of a mix between the materials created for the show presented in March 2019 and those that were created during two creative residencies. The first took place at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in Amherst, Virginia, in October 2019. The second took place in Nice in November 2019.
Le ravissement includes nine movements: Arrival, Doubt, Fear, Ecstasy, Restlessness, Call, Detachment, Rapture, Disappearance. The final version of the work was composed in 2021.
Robert Normandeau’s work as a composer is mainly devoted to acousmatic music. More specifically, by the tones used and the aesthetic choices that tend to it, his approach is part of a "cinema for the ear" where "sense" contributes to the development of his works just as much as "sound". More recently he has composed a cycle of immersive multichannel music for speaker dome. Space has become a major feature of his musical work. Along with concert music, he has composed, for a period of twenty years, incidental music especially for dance and theatre.
He also worked as artistic director for over twenty years, especially for the concert series Clair de terre from 1989 to ’93 at the Planétarium de Montréal, and Rien à voir and Akousma from 1997 to 2006.
He was Professor in electroacoustic music composition at Université de Montréal between 1999 and 2024, after completing the first Doctorate in Electroacoustic Composition (1992). He leads the GRIS (Groupe de recherche en immersion spatiale: Space Immersion Research Group), which produces SpatGRIS, a sound spatialization software.
Robert Normandeau is an award winner of numerous international competitions, including the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, Linz (Austria, 1996), Bourges (France, 1986, ’88, ’93), Fribourg (Switzerland, 2002), Luigi Russolo, Varese (Italy, 1989, ’90), Métamorphoses, Brussels (Belgium, 2002, 04), Musica Nova, Prague (Czech Republic, 1994, ’95, ’98, 2012, ’13), Noroit-Léonce Petitot, Arras (France, 1991, ’93), Phonurgia Nova, Arles (France, 1987, ’88), Stockholm (Sweden, 1992) and Giga-Hertz (Karlsruhe, 2010).