The inter-disciplinary performance piece of undergraduate students Valentina Plata & Aybi Özel was a perfect introduction to the myriad possibilities of research at Milieux. Plata and Özel met in the cross-faculty class Dance as Social Life and Cultural Practice, which brings together history and performance arts students in an exploration of methods. From that class, their collaboration emerged, with Özel, a visual arts student, leading the drawings and Plata, an incoming undergraduate fellow at Milieux, manipulating the sounds.
Their performance established a sense of joint inquiry for the evening. Attendees had gradually, and then enthusiastically, joined Özel around the paper. I resolved to hang back around the edges, watching them scribble busily. Some sat outside the circle, eyes-closed, listening to the expanding soundscape. The sole child in attendance began hammering on one of the mics, prompting some wonderfully aggressive sounds, though eventually an adult intervened in the intensity. I smiled to myself. The risks of collective creation.
Blog
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Hear me Hear you
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Opal
Opal
A semi-improvised work in collaboration with Malte Leander, where we combine hydrophones, field recordings, voice, and movement into an electroacoustic performance.
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Speak, darkness
Album with Noah Rosa coming soon
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A Gesture
live electroacoustic improvisation duo
A Gesture emerged in 2022 as a meeting point between two electroacoustic artists, Paerix and Vaiu, where each encounter unfolds into a new improvisation. Attuning to the inner and outer spaces around them, they open pathways for the exchange of musical gifts.
Blending voice, electronic processing, and embodied performance, A Gesture moves between electronica and experimental long-form works inspired by their fascination with nature’s geometric yet entangled forms. Careful listening lies at the heart of their intimate live performances.
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Falls
BETWEEN WATER AND STONE by V.K. Preston
Falls (2025-ongoing)
12-minute (loop) multichannel audiovisual installation “Winter” “Falls” is an ecological and memorial project shaped from video, field recordings, and visits to Ottawa’s Rideau Falls. It is part of a longer cycle consisting of a lecture performance, video installation, scores, and a cycle of poems: Between Water and Stone.
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How to Inhabit These Different Temporalities?
A performance-installation by Sandeep Bhagwati for ten musicians at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, in connection with the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec’s Homage Series and as part of the Future Resonance Festival of New Music Toronto.
An archipelago of five musical islands, relaying music back and forth, each one contributing according to their own temporality, tradition, emotion, rhythm and score.
Being immersed in Sandeep Bhagwati’s musical visions is a true gift. He is not only an otherworldly composer, but also a generous mentor and musical friend. Through him, I was introduced to the practice of comprovisation—a blend of composition and improvisation—which has become a core part of my own approach as a composer.
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Madre
Listen to Madre here Madre [Mother] is an 8-channel soundscape composition encompassing field recordings from the Yucatán Peninsula, specifically within The Route of the Cenotes in Cancún and on the island of Cozumel. The piece starts slowly with a voice emerging from underwater, later to be joined by rhythmic creatures inside and outside a cenote, natural interconnected underground bodies of water; the listener passes through further bodies of water before surfacing. How can the human voice and natural environments create a relationship, a connection, a shared intimacy?
Year of composition: 2024
Genre: Soundscape
Format: Fixed media
Hardware used: Zoom H5 Field Recorder
Software used: Ableton Live, MConvolutionEZ
Duration of the submitted work: 8:57
Premiere: April 25, 2024, Octophonic SFU-Concordia Exchange Concert, Goldcorp Centre for the Contemporary Arts, Studio T.
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insee
Live improvised electroacoustic piece in a Montréal home-studio, where curiosity entangled portals to listen and see within.
Cello by dorian bell
Voice and lyrics by Vaiu (Valentina Plata)
Field recording by dorian bell
Post-production, mix and master by Valentina Plata and dorian bell
Album cover by Mea Brissetcredits
released October 20, 2023
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Fluyen
Fluyen (2025)
Valentina Plata
Premiere: March 1, 2025, Andrew Emond, Sandeep Bhagwati , video: Kasey Pocius, spatialization • Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques 2025: La Grande Nuit 2025, Agora Hydro-Québec — Cœur des sciences — UQAM, Montréal (Québec)
Fluyen (they flow) is an electroacoustic work composed in response to a video-score by Andrew Emond and Sandeep Bhagwati. The images of Montréal’s human-made tunnels contrasts with the naturally occurring cenotes — underground water caves — which are representative of my home in Mexico. In both subterranean worlds, water passes through different states of being — sometimes turbid, sometimes clear. What stories does the water have to share? And are we willing to listen?
