Nicole Lizée (born 1973)
Nicole Lizée was born in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, Canada. She received a Master of Music from McGill University and currently lives in Montreal.
Nicole Lizée’s website states that she
creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.
Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.
As a result, Nicole Lizée’s compositions often incorporate humor into their presentation, and are quite fun to watch as well as listen to. Dancist begins with a film of a man describing a kit he bought to learn about dance music:
Hitchcock Études (a 2014 work “for piano, glitch and film”) involves rearrangements and distortions of scenes and Bernard Hermann’s music from Psycho, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Birds:
Nicole Lizée’s 2011 work Death to Kosmische was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and incorporates prerecorded electronics as well as requiring the musicians to play on a Stylophone (a stylus-operated analog synthesizer invented in 1967), an Omnichord (an electronic instrument introduced in 1981 by Suzuki), and a compact record player.
The word “kosmische” in the title alludes to the phrase “kosmische music” (“cosmic music”) introduced in the liner notes of 1971 Tangerine Dream album Alpha Centauri. The word is defined by the Urban Dictionary as “really, cool, smooth but spaced out in an experimental kind of way.”