JAMES O'CALLAGHAN

TOO REAL / FEELS FAKE (2022) performed by l'Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), Véronique Lacroix  TOO REAL / FEELS FAKE is an examination of the uncanny space between ‘real’ and simulated sounds and spaces. Traversing between instrumental, environmental, and synthetic sounds, the work renders homage to the nostalgic and beautiful quality of things that are ‘not quite right.’ Drawn from the ‘classic’ synthesized sounds of simple oscillators and vintage drum machines, vocal synthesis, general MIDI samples, field recordings, and manipulated media samples (including recordings of a reel-to-reel film projector and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s spoken line “realer than real” from the David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ (1999)), the work is an expression of the poetry of the hyperreal, where instruments imitate sounds that were meant to imitate instruments. Most of all, it is a tribute to the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal and their director Véronique Lacroix, who commissioned the work. I wanted to create a work that would be fun and virtuosic, allowing for the musicians to explore many different sides of their expression, filtered through excess and saturation.

Trailer for ÉCHO, a new film by renowned choreographer Édouard Lock with dancer Rachele Buriassi, and my work «Alone and unalone» as its score, interpreted by Ensemble Paramirabo

Part 3, the germ of compassion is the heart of benevolence, is titled after a quote from the philosopher Mencius. The quote continues: “the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. One has these four germs just as they have four limbs. For one possessing these four germs to deny their own potentialities is for them to cripple themselves.” This movement, featuring footage of plant-care (performed by Gabriella Garcia) attempts to recenter after the widening of tensions in second movement. A return to the real from the ideal, the piece attempts to find calm and balance in flow and care, in accepting the material now. IMMATERIAL HOW was commissioned by Proxima Centauri, Hanatsu Miroir, and Ensemble Paramirabo, with assistance from the Artistic Office of the New Aquitaine Region (OARA) and the Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music (SACEM).

“Outhere” for quartet and offstage electronics, commissioned and premiered by UltraViolet Ensemble

J'étais honoré d'être invité de contribuer 5 pièces d'art sonore autour de récitations des poèmes inédits de Salah El Khalfa Beddiari, Carole David, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Georgette LeBlanc, et Elkahna Talbi pour le Festival de la poésie de Montréal. Mon formidable collègue Evelin Ramón a créé des pièces avec des poètes Maya Cousineau Mollen, Nicholas Dawson, J.R. Léveillé, Josiane Ménard, et Hector Ruiz. Pour les écouter, trouver les codes QR dans les affiches à travers Montréal cet été, ou en ligne via plusieurs services de diffusion des balados !

Listen to the work as an interactive app, creating your own mix of the different instruments in any combination! iOS: apps.apple.com/us/app/standing-wave/id1601878153 Android: play.google.com/store/apps/detail…edia.StandingWave

A bilateral, a symmetry for John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Orchestra A bilateral, a symmetry is a reaction to the problems posed by dialectical and binary thinking, and shares an expression of fluidity, instability, and in-betweens that resists the impulse of encyclopedic categorization. It was created by manipulating recordings of improvisations and notated fragments by 8 of Vancouver’s most daring musicians. The video is created from an assembly of turn-of-the-century biological illustrations (most notably those of Ernst Haeckel), scans of Jacques Derrida’s annotated copy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, as well as footage from the Gulf Islands of BC.

KNOWNS defamiliarizes the everyday object of the chair, framing it as a sounding instrument. The piece looks at the fragility and tension of the plurality of meanings that chairs can convey, and acts as a kind of ode to the enormous weight of associations the objects sometimes carry for us. Chairs are places where we work, where we rest, where we gather together, or set ourselves apart. They can give us comfort, authority, welcome, or take these things away from us. Empty chairs can mean different things to us than when they are sat on. So much of these things have to do with the contexts we give the chairs, but when we listen to the objects themselves, we can discover new things about them and see new beauty in them, and open ourselves up to other associations. KNOWNS is a site for all of these possible associations. Particular inspirations of mine included Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art work One and Three Chairs (1965), Åke Parmerud’s electroacoustic work Les objets obscures (1991), and The Backstreet Boys’ choreography for As Long As You Love Me (1997). KNOWNS was created by assembling video improvisations of performances with an amplified wooden chair at the Woodside church in Troy, New York, courtesy of a curatorial residency offered by Gabriella Garcia. The multitudinous sounds offered by the chair are expanded, made hyper-real, or estranged, through electronic manipulation. The work was created for the 2021 Wonderhorse festival in Whitehorse, Yukon.

My first album of electronica out now, under the alias Mercyry, with Falmouth-based Xylem Records, and cover art with Laura Margaret Ramsey

Full concert of Novarumori with Innovations en concert, Isak Golschneider conducting, and Émilie Girard-Charest as soloist, including the premiere of my piece “New work, collapsing, new work.” New work, collapsing, new work is about rapid cycles of creation and destruction. In everything there are beginnings, and endings, and sometimes experiencing something begin and end quickly can create a feeling of timelessness, or the kind of whiplash effect of rapidly-experienced strong emotions like love or grief.The piece emerges from silence several times, accumulating in sound masses of electrical hums and harmonies built outward from the open strings of the instruments. It examines ‘breaking points’ through bursts of energy, letting loose ‘new sounds’ that are nonetheless evocative of the past. The piece acts as a kind of nostalgic, retrofuturistic love-letter for the quickly-waning novelty of avant-garde art movements and music technology. It pays homage to 90s digital synthesis, acousmatic-like gestures, ‘dated’ electronic music effects like ring modulation. Seeded in the name of the genre of New Music itself is the kind of paradox ‘newness’ faces as a temporal phenomenon. The title is at once a tongue-in-cheek homage to the temporary title ‘New Work’ often given to pieces before their completion, and the German Industrial Music group Einstürzende Neubauten (“Collapsing New Buildings” - especially in reference to the quickly-constructed Neubauten created during the GDR). The electronics contain a brief manipulated sample of their track ‘Ende Neu’ from the 1996 album of the same name.The piece features two improvising soloists (Émilie Girard-Charest and Stéphane Diamantakiou)  who are each offered moments to respond to the preceding section of music, offering an individual personalized ‘last word’ to the end of a creation-destruction cycle.New Work, Collapsing, New Work was commissioned by Innovations en concert and created for Novarumori with Isak Goldschneider conducting.

Percussion: Rick Sacks  Percussion: Britton-René Collins Percussion: Haruka Fuji Celeste, Clavichord: Wesley Shen Harp: Sanya Eng Violin: Lynn Kuo Violin: Aysel Taghi-Zada Viola: Keith Hamm Cello: Amahl Arulanandam Bass: Adam Scime

Extended artist talk about my piece «Alone and unalone» for IRCAM Forum

Thank-you video for the Prix Opus «compositeur de l’année»

A large excerpt of my recent commission from Esprit Orchestra, is now available to listen to online (2/3 of the piece). I also sat down to chat with the artistic director Alex Pauk to discuss the piece. That virtual interview is available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qv6F8FWZ7Q&feature=emb_title

Paramirabo propose ici une oeuvre qui repousse les limites de la musique avec des sonorités concrètes et des enregistrements travaillés juxtaposés à des sons acoustiques... Le compositeur James O'Callaghan, auteur des pièces de l'album, est un collaborateur de longue date de l’ensemble. Le directeur artistique dit qu'il partage la fascination pour les environnements sonores avec le compositeur. James O’Callaghan Nominated in the 2020 JUNO Awards PARMA Recordings The 2020 nominations are not O’Callaghan’s first JUNO appearance — he was nominated in the “Classical Composition of the Year” category in 2014, as the youngest person to ever receive a nomination in that category. ALONE & UNALONE was released on Ravello Records in October 2019. The album garnered him praise from the press, including being called “one of the most original voices in…contemporary music” (Voir).

Video from last year's premiere of "One and Four Chairs" for Architek Percussion.