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09/02/2024

xenopraxis - In a Sedimental Mood (HTRA037) is out now. Feat. original art by Ilyse Krivel and xenopraxis. Mastered by
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xenopraxis is a pseudonym of Toronto-based intermedia artist Marc Couroux, an exuberant yet somewhat elusive figure who operates at the periphery of numerous artistic practices. During his early career, Couroux was arguably best known as a pianist and champion of living composers, receiving accolades such as “the Glenn Gould of contemporary music” (Musicworks), and the Prix OPUS Award for “Discovery of the Year” in 1998. Alongside composer Michael Oesterle, he co-founded and co-directed Ensemble KORE from 1997-2010 in Montréal
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His typically audacious debut for Halocline Trance, In a Sedimental Mood is a 73+ minute work consisting of 84 individual sections broken up over four sides of vinyl. It constitutes a sort of self-subverting “background music” that draws upon research Couroux undertook within the realms of psychoacoustics and the neuroscience of music. It also cribs a good part of its premise from the Muzak Corporation’s playbook.

06/02/2024

xenopraxis - In a Sedimental Mood (HTRA037) is out this friday. Preview the single ‘Section A’ and preorder the gatefold vinyl now. Feat. original art by Ilyse Krivel and xenopraxis. Mastered by Link in bio.
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xenopraxis is a pseudonym of Toronto-based intermedia artist Marc Couroux, an exuberant yet somewhat elusive figure who operates at the periphery of numerous artistic practices. During his early career, Couroux was arguably best known as a pianist and champion of living composers, receiving accolades such as “the Glenn Gould of contemporary music” (Musicworks), and the Prix OPUS Award for “Discovery of the Year” in 1998. Alongside composer Michael Oesterle, he co-founded and co-directed Ensemble KORE from 1997-2010 in Montréal
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His typically audacious debut for Halocline Trance, In a Sedimental Mood is a 73+ minute work consisting of 84 individual sections broken up over four sides of vinyl. It constitutes a sort of self-subverting “background music” that draws upon research Couroux undertook within the realms of psychoacoustics and the neuroscience of music. It also cribs a good part of its premise from the Muzak Corporation’s playbook.

31/01/2024

xenopraxis aka Marc Couroux’s audacious debut for Halocline Trance, In a Sedimental Mood is a 73+ minute work consisting of 84 individual sections broken up over four sides of vinyl. It constitutes a sort of self-subverting “background music” that draws upon research Couroux undertook within the realms of psychoacoustics and the neuroscience of music. It also cribs a good part of its premise from the Muzak Corporation’s playbook. Stimulus progression was Muzak’s name for the smooth, carefully moulded arcs of music they crafted to lull passive listeners into trance-like states, while also ushering them imperceptibly along psychological trajectories. Its typical purpose was to fuel workplace productivity.

24/01/2024

xenopraxis is a pseudonym of Toronto-based intermedia artist Marc Couroux, an exuberant yet somewhat elusive figure who operates at the periphery of numerous artistic practices. During his early career, Couroux was arguably best known as a pianist and champion of living composers, receiving accolades such as “the Glenn Gould of contemporary music” (Musicworks), and the Prix OPUS Award for “Discovery of the Year” in 1998. Alongside composer Michael Oesterle, he co-founded and co-directed Ensemble KORE from 1997-2010 in Montréal. Just over twenty years ago, however, his interests began to shift and his experience in the concert music realm in turn became fodder for more conceptual forays that reframed the concert as something to be investigated and critiqued rather than simply enacted. Works such as American Dreaming John Cassavetes (1999) and le contrepoint académique (sic) (2000) exemplified this transition, the latter’s presentation at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville eliciting descriptions such as “controversial”, “demented” and “illuminated.”
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Marc Couroux maintains a deep commitment to creative exploration on various fronts including video, sound, performance, and writing. As a member of the trio Nidus alongside Jason Doell and Matthew Ramolo (AKA Khôra, whose debut album was released by Constellation), he produces dizzyingly dense long-duration (and often site-specific) electronic improvisations. Other output includes novels, television shows, installations and presentations at venues and festivals that include Club Transmediale in Berlin, and Portland’s PDX Fest, Latitude 53’s Visualeyez Festival (Edmonton), Arraymusic (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto), Live to Tape Artist Television Festival (Chicago), Vancouver New Music, and Binary Cities Festival - Nexmap (San Francisco), who commissioned a series of video works from him in 2009. Couroux is an Associate Professor in York University’s Visual Art and Art History department, which he joined in 2006.

18/01/2024

Preview and preorder the gatefold vinyl edition of In a Sedimental Mood by xenopraxis featuring artwork by Project info below:
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Conceived in 2010, In A Sedimental Mood was premiered alongside screenings of several of Couroux’s video works at an event mounted by Toronto’s Pleasure Dome. It later appeared in a number of other contexts including the MaerzMusik Festival (Berlin) and The Idea of the Avant-Garde exhibition (NeMe Centre, Limassol, Cyprus), the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, among others. It also was addressed in composer, theorist, and fellow Halocline Trance artist Eldritch Priest’s outlandish book Boring Formless Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2013).
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The infamous slogan that Muzak touted—“heard but not listened to”—holds a different significance when applied to In A Sedimental Way. Its series of brief, consecutive episodes (which gradually contract in duration from just over a minute to roughly 30 seconds), unfold as an endless series of beginnings, each a unique iteration of an unchanging collection of musical ingredients including loungy piano, pseudo-Baroque harpsichord figurations, detuned Rhodes piano, hare-brained Harmolodic bass lines. These stylistic tropes are rendered in plasticky electronic presets that only underscore the psychedelic uniformity of the composition and the faint difference between each section effectively gaslights the listener into questioning the functionality of their own memory.

14/06/2022

Lots of unreleased music in this new mix for - listen back, link in bio 🫧 art by
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Halocline Trance True FM [06.11.22 Mix]
L CON - Plant Room (forthcoming Halocline Trance)
Mue - Naica (forthcoming Halocline Trance)
Colin FIsher - Zero Experience (Halocline Trance, 2021)
ACT! - Oblivion Shuffle (feat. Robin Dann + Alanna Stuart) (Halocline Trance, 2022)
Casey MQ - Walls Could Talk (Halocline Trance, 2020)
Myst Milano - No Sleep [demo]
R Flex - Hounds of Hell (forthcoming Halocline Trance)
ACT! - Lotto (feat. Robin Dann + Alanna Stuart) (Halocline Trance, 2022)
Germaine Liu - Shapes and Contours (forthcoming Halocline Trance)
Marc Couroux - In a Sedimental Mood (excerpt) (forthcoming Halocline Trance)
Eldritch Priest - Omphaloskepsis VI (Halocline Trance, 2022)
eternalrealworld - entrance hypnogogia (Halocline Trance, 2022)
A Hutchie - Disklavier (Halocline Trance, 2020)

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