[Exclusive] Experimental Audio-Visual Duo, Le Révélateur, Share Glitched-Out Video "Afterimage Selves"

Five years of intense research and laborious audio-visual explorations have enabled experimental music act Le Révélateur to offer us Extreme Events, the group's brand new LP and possibly its most mature and technical work to date.

Working at the crossroads of electronic sounds and visuals, as well as digital and analog technologies, the Montreal-based artists—made up of visual artist Sabrina Ratté(who we previously covered here and here)and electronic music producer Roger Tellier-Craig—announced the album today, which will be available in Europe on August 22nd and in the states on September 2nd through Root Strata.

This new relesase brings together a series of sonic experimentations in which a multitude of hybrid sonic textures— sometimes dense, complex and asymmetrical—merge together to give life to a post-modern symphonic collection. Some tracks buzz and hum in glitched-out cacophony, while others incorporate warped sonic bodies through use of Analogue Solutions’ Telemark synth. The stunning visuals created by Ratté for the live and video performances perfectly integrate with Tellier-Craig's music and offer a puzzling A/V performance from another dimension.

We were impatient to delve into the heart of this retro-futuristic trip, and the duo generously offered The Creators Project the premiere of Afterimage Selves, the first single from this album, a pulsing soundscape accompanied by a hypnotic video voyage by Ratté.

We had a chat with the prolific group to discuss the origins of this collaboration, their myriad of influences, and to get a few more details about their new record.

The Creators Project: Could you tell us about the genesis of this collaboration. How did you find yourselves working together? 

Roger Tellier-Craig: We started working together in early 2010. At the time, Sabrina was moving away from film and focusing more specifically on video, and she asked me to compose the soundtracks to her first experiments. I was completely obsessed with the development of early computer music and electronic music in the '70s and '80s and, coincidentally, Sabrina was also immersed in the history of electronically generated images from that era, so it just seemed to make a lot of sense to try and see what would come out of us collaborating.

Later that year Root Strata released my first tape as Le Révélateur, and I started thinking about how I would present this material in concert. I knew very clearly that I did not want to end up alone on stage with a bunch of machines, as performance has never really been my thing, so the idea of playing live on stage with Sabrina seemed like the ideal solution. In addition, we were both very interested in the combination of electronic sound and imagery, and this seemed like the ideal setting to explore this idea further. As a result, Sabrina eventually ended up doing all the videos for the project, as well as our photos and all the images used for the album covers.

Ok, but more specifically, what has Le Révélateur been up to in the past five years? How has the project evolved?

Roger Tellier-Craig: When I started the project back in 2008, I basically knew nothing about how to use electronic gear to make music. I spent the 10 previous years playing in rock bands, and although I had dabbled with electronic music here and there, I had never really dedicated myself to understanding how all of this stuff actually worked. In this light, I would say that my first three releases feel more like demos to me, and that Extreme Events is actually the first proper album by Le Révélateur. So these past few years were like a long learning curve where I was lucky enough to release stuff and play some cool gigs here and there.

We also developed into an audio-visual duo in the meantime, as it was becoming impossible for me to even imagine working with someone else regarding the visual side of the project, since Sabrina’s aesthetic was so closely linked with my inspirations, and it felt as though her work was now as much a part of the project as was the sound. I feel like we finally managed to zero in on this kind of impossible/virtual reality aesthetic we were going for over the past couple of years, and the artwork for Extreme Events, as well as the video for “Afterimage Selves” really depicts this. I have no idea where we’re gonna go next, as I feel like it’s time now to let what we’ve worked on for the past two years on the loose.

Let's talk about Extreme Events—what were the musical inspiration or other influences on this album?

Roger Tellier-Craig: Working on this record was really different from all the other ones. On past releases, since I was diving head first into a lot of older electronic music that I was discovering or re-discovering, a lot of the music I was making was colured by this fact, since I was learning about how gear worked and how to get certain results from it.

When I finished my last tape Horizon Fears, it felt like I had reached the end of this process of assimilation. I wanted to move on and make a record that I didn’t understand. I wanted to make music without having a specific model in mind. Something that would kind of write itself out of pure experience, in the sense that I might have an idea about the dynamics I wanted in a piece, if it was rhythmical or not, fast or slow, moody or driven, etc, but that was it; I would simply experiment with my equipment and deal with the results to see what I could make out of it all.

So there were no specific influences this time out, though I must say I did end up in a kind of dialog with a bunch of different things all throughout the process. A big thing for me was that I wanted to create a sound world that would echo what it might feel like inside impossible realities, like in the computer worlds of Neuromancer or Tron; something electronic and really dense, containing a lot of detail and information, and kind of vaporous and immersive.

I actually read the first three books by Gibson during the time I was working on this LP, so that certainly had a considerable impact on this record. I’ve also been really interested in “online” life and the relationship we share with each other through avatars and idealized identities, and how this alters our sense of perception in general, and I guess I wanted to link all of this together and make a dizzying record that manifested this fascination with our escapist tendencies.

Sabrina, I already know some of your major influences like Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lillian Schwartz, Ed Tannenbaum, Tosio Matsumoto, and more..but what else played a factor for this project?

Sabrina Ratté: It’s hard for me to clearly identify my inspirations for "Afterimage Selves" because this video has been in the making for the last two years, with footage generated in different periods of times. I also feel that my inspirations are getting more abstract, as I aim to create images that won’t be referential to the past, but rather in the hope that they will be disorienting in some ways.

That was part of my intentions with "Afterimage Selves," I wanted to mix together disparate yet related types of visuals in order to create an eclectic world. The music was also the main source of inspiration for the structure; for example, I really like the multiple and sudden cuts of the composition, it gave me the opportunity to play with the idea of jump-cuts and switch between different kind of images, as if there had been some kind of interferences in the signal.

Could you give me additional details on your creative process? How do you work together? 

Roger Tellier-Craig: We work together in a pretty organic way and it varies a lot, but in general I need to start on my own, since the music for the record comes first in the context of working on Le Révélateur. Once I have some kind of basic structure I pass it on to Sabrina and she starts riffing on that material.

Then we do a back and forth thing for a while and things start fleshing out and solidifying. We also like to keep the material “alive," so if we are playing shows we tend to alter the material along the way, so the material might actually mutate for a while before crystallizing.

The technical aspect is extremely important in your work and particularly the combination of analog and digital techniques. Can you tell me more about that? How does this fusion help your productions?

Roger Tellier-Craig: Yeah, we both like to mix things up between analog and digital technology. I guess it’s just a very natural thing for us since we’re both fans of a lot of different kinds of aesthetics from the 60’s and onwards. Personally, I’m also very interested in creating something that may hint at the past, but where that reference is challenged by contradictory elements in the piece that indicate otherwise. I have a couple of analog synths but I mostly used Analogue Solutions’ Telemark on this record, along with the Roland System 100 Model 101 and some Moog pedals.

I tend to improvise on those synths and then process the audio through granular synthesis in order to generate basic material for the tracks. I work in Digital Performer and use MIDI to control everything, since the Telemark has MIDI and I have a Kenton MIDI-CV converter to control the Roland. Sabrina works with her computer and with her LZX analog video synthesizer, as well as with video feedback. When we play live we connect our gear together and the audio signals from my synths alter Sabrina’s video signals.

Sabrina, concerning the visuals that you offer for the LIVE and video performances, how do you work to adapt them to the soundtrack and how does Roger's music influence your visuals?

Sabrina: Roger and I have been working together for almost 5 years now and our vision for Le Révélateur is very close and complementary. Since the beginning of our collaboration, I’ve felt a natural connection between Roger’s music and my visuals, but now it seems like these few years of experience make this feeling even more tangible and I believe that it shows when we perform live.

In a more pragmatic perspective, we’ve been exploring different techniques as well, and one of them was to connect both our modulars together in order to achieve direct synchronization between the music and the images. But this is only one aspect of the performance, and it gets mixed with many other images that are not sync by wires or anything. It’s important for me to keep a certain amount of spontaneity in a performance, because that’s when interesting accidents have a chance to happen.

What's the next phase? Any new projects in sight?

Sabrina Ratté: I’m currently working on a new video series for which Roger will compose the soundtrack, and it will be available on Undervolt&Co in August. We will also collaborate on two upcoming video installations which should take place in the fall and in the winter (more info soon). Finally, I’m working on the publication of a fanzine which will feature a selection of my still images, and it will be released later this year on Shelter Press.

Roger Tellier-Craig: Nothing too concrete for the time being on the side of Le Révélateur; we just played a couple of shows here in Montreal, so we’re gonna lay low until the record comes out. I do have a track coming out sometime this fall on a compilation curated by Steve Hauschildt for Air Texture; this will be a kind of remix/variation of one of the tracks on the new record.

For more on Le Révélateur, visit the group's website here.

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