Events > Book Launch

03 Jul. 2020

squint press online launch

Time
8PM ET

Register in advance for this launch

squint press is proud to present an online event in support of their recent publications. The event will feature live and recorded presentations/interventions/performances by Simon Brown, Marla Hlady, Private Robots (Juliana Pivato & Seb Roberts), Alexandre St-Onge, and Xuan Ye. squint press was founded in 1999 by Christof Migone & Alexandre St-Onge.

All proceeds from sales at this event will be donated to Black Lives Matter – Toronto and Hoodstock Montréal-Nord

PUBLICATIONS

squint 01e (BOOK + PDF)
Entonnoir de Nous (2020)
by Simon Brown & Alexandre St-Onge
Entonnoir de Nous: a machine misunderstands two humans over several years, and unwittingly writes a book of poetry.

squint 00P (LP + digital downloads)
Playing Piano (2020)
by Marla Hlady
Playing Piano features a partially deconstructed upright player piano prepared in the spirit of John Cage. This fully mechanized 1920’s player piano is animated by a motor and pneumatics (as opposed to being played by a person). A perforated paper roll, the physical translation of the musical score, controls the mechanized elements. The preparations to Playing Piano include various machines which strum and press a pie plate against the strings, whistle using the air of the pneumatics and amplify various parts of the piano’s mechanics. An array of sensors placed on the strings in conjunction with a computer and a series of microprocessors, enables the player piano to control these preparations. Recorded at: YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto (January 2008) and mixed in Calgary (May 2018), both by John Abram. Mastered by: Harris Newman, Grey Market Mastering, Montreal (June 2018).

squint 00Z (CD + digital downloads)
Poets Barrio TV (2020)
by Private Robots
Private Robots (Juliana Pivato & Seb Roberts) began their collaboration as a resistance to credible musicianship: two nodes in a network sending noise to signal. Sharing an acute sense of the irrational (touched by technophobia), improvisations of failed New Wave anthems and dubby deconstructions of danceable indie pop are what remain. With minimal tools, Private Robots mine for nuggets of nostalgic pop beauty, to melt, mold, forge, and shatter into a hallucinatory scrapheap of shuddering, scorched fragments. Not entirely unlike Throbbing Gristle covering Fairport Convention as The Flying Lizards, Private Robots describe humans and technologies that deserve each other. Poets Barrio TV is their first release.

squint 01j (BOOK + PDF)
Jet du bas dit AA l’eau guet avec l’invisible (2020)
by Alexandre St-Onge
Jet du bas dit AA l’eau guet avec l’invisible is a book and a sonic sculpture created with the material that emerged from the experimental performative process presented at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery between March 9 and April 6 2019 in Montreal. The exhibition explored the heuristic potential of an improvised creative process where the active apprehension of emergent contingencies is omnipresent. In dialogue with artists as well as the exhibition site itself, invisible performances were reembodied in audio, textual, and visual material that attests to the transformation of a source that is always already inaccessible.

squint 00U (digital downloads)
Universal Serial Bus (2020)
by Xuan Ye
The Universal Serial Bus is an easy-listening trip to be heard but not listened to. The hours-long ambient sounds in the release are field recordings that are processed through X’s learnt listening patterns. Perceiving the surrounding spectrum in harmonics, X tunes the body as an interface to the recorded fields. At the nexus of noise and music, the USB is an extension to X’s long term project in the sonic banality of “useless music”, a counterproductive twist to muzak’s total design of background music.

BIOS

Simon Brown (1979) is a poet, translator and artist from southwestern New Brunswick (Peskotomuhkati traditional territory) based in the Quebec City area (Wendat and Abenaki traditional territory). His texts have been presented in books, interdisciplinary artworks, collaborative performances, and via platforms such as Lemon Hound, Estuaire, Le Sabord, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, Watts, and filling Station. As a translator, he has adapted texts by Erin Robinsong, Maude Pilon, Alice Burdick, Maude Veilleux and Danielle LaFrance, among others. His collections and artist’s books have been published in Quebec, Canada and France by Vanloo, Moult, Le laps, squint press, Paper Pusher and Frog Hollow.

Marla Hlady draws, makes sculpture, works with sites and sounds and sometimes makes video. Hlady’s kinetic sculptures and sound pieces often consist of common objects (such as teapots, cocktail mixers, jars) that are expanded and animated to reveal unexpected sonic and poetic properties often using a system-based approach to composition. She’s shown widely in solo and group shows. She has mounted sited sound works in such places as the fjords of Norway, a grain silo as part of the sound festival Electric Eclectic, an apartment window in Berlin, a tour bus in Ottawa, the Hudson’s Bay department store display window and an empty shell of a building. She also, at times, collaborates. She currently lectures at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

Juliana Pivato is a musician and a visual artist permanently based in Toronto. She spends time as a writer, a university lecturer and as a parent to 2 children under the age of 5. She regularly collaborates with Marc Couroux even though much of this involves recording arguments with a hidden H1. Since quitting social media she has taught herself German, Classical Piano and toddler de-escalation techniques. She has finally given up on cooking squash for any reason. Her first edited book “Pictura: Essays on the works of Roy Kiyooka” will be published with Guernica Editions in Summer 2020. This is her first album.

Seb Roberts is a musician and sound engineer, currently based in Toronto. He has spent time as an improvisor, solo artist, and member of various bands in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. In Tokyo, Roberts also worked as a staff engineer at the renowned independent recording studio, Tsubame Studio, working with such iconoclastic acts as Z, Rebel One Excalibur, and Detrytus. His most recent solo release was 2017’s Gravedigger, and he is currently struggling to teach himself to play the tenor saxophone.

Alexandre St-Onge is an interdisciplinary artist and a sonic performer exploring the mutation of the performative body through its sonic, textual and visual mediations. PhD in art (UQAM, 2015) and assistant professor at l’École d’art of Laval University, he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable. He founded éditions|squint|press with Christof Migone and he worked with collectives and artists such as: Marie Brassard, Simon Brown, Karine Denault, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Lynda Gaudreau, Klaxon Gueule, kondition pluriel, mineminemine, line Nault, Shalabi Effect, undo, and Unzip Violence, amongst others.

Xuan Ye / 叶轩 (CN/CA) makes media poetry synthesizing language, code, sound, body, image, data, light, and time through diagrammatic processes and multi-medial translations. X’s work has been featured, exhibited and performed internationally, including Canadian Art, AGO (CA), Vivid Projects (UK), Supermarket Art Fair (SE), InterAccess (CA), Inside-out Art Museum (CN), Goethe-Institut, ArtAsiaPacific, KUNSTFORUM, Trinity Square Video (CA), among others. X’s live performances and music releases have received critical accolades from Bandcamp, Musicworks and Exclaim!

LINKS

https://squint.press/
+
http://simonbrown.ca/
http://marlahlady.com/
https://christofmigone.com/
http://julianapivato.org/
http://www.sebrobertsmusic.com/
https://www.alexandrest-onge.com/alexandrest-onge.com/Alexandre_St-Onge.html
https://a.pureapparat.us/

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