Monique Jean is convinced that the corporeality of sound simultaneously opens doors to sensation and meaning. She is constantly looking to explore the imperfections, tensions and clashes of meaningful and vivid sound materials in order to develop a stream of sound that behaves like a complex organism, unstable and constantly transmuting reality into poetry.
Jean studied electroacoustic composition at Université de Montréal with Francis Dhomont and completed, under Nicolas Bernier, a PhD for which she developed a multitrack improvisation approach that brings together her own analogue device and no-input as a source of unpredictability and instability. The Volt series (started in 2015) and Dancing on the Edge of Darkness (2012), a work accompanied by a 5-screen video by Monique Bertrand, come from that approach.
Monique Jean is one fourth of the electroacoustic improvisation quartet Theresa Transistor. She has also collaborated on projects involving dance, video art and cinema. For instance, she produced the soundtrack and the music for The Geographies of DAR, a film by Monique LeBlanc (Best Canadian Film Prize at the 2024 Festival of Films on Art [FIFA]). She was also the sound designer for the poetic / visual performance L’ombre obscure que nous sommes, a collaboration with poets Denise Desautels and Marc-André Brouillette, and photographer Dominique Malaterre, presented at the 2022 Festival international de la littérature (FIL).
Jean’s works have been presented and performed in multiple concerts and festivals, both in Canada and abroad, including at Multiphonies (Paris, France), Akousma (Montréal), Sonorities (Belfast, Northern Ireland), NYCEMF (New York, USA), The San Francisco Tape Music Festival (USA), Ai-maako (Santiago, Chile), and Elektra (Montréal). In 2012, she was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Fondation Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide (Italy).
Her album Greffes was awarded the 2012-13 Opus Prize for Best Album — Musique actuelle, Electroacoustic Music by the Conseil québécois de la musique (CQM). The following year, her work T.A.G. received a nomination for the Opus Prize for Best New Work.
[English translation: François Couture, iv-26]
