As part of our ongoing Montreal Sessions residency, CKUT and MUTEK are thrilled to be welcoming one of our favourite local sound-benders, Dominique Alexander, back into the studio. Familiarize yourself with her excellent work below and catch her live on the air from 3-5pm, streaming from your faithful source ckut.ca.
buffalo MRI is the solo project of Montréal-based experimental musician Dominique Alexander. Since 2013, Alexander has developed an approach focused on prepared tape, field recordings, sampler performance, and fluctuation between structure and improvisation. Her creative process employs a wide range of techniques and sound sources, from voyeuristic moments and spontaneous background noises caught on tape to plunderphonics-style sample work and everywhere in between. From a given handful of recordings, Alexander manages to extract minute details and reconfigure them, weaving unrelated sounds into new images in performance.
As well as having made solo appearances at numerous one-off events and festivals in Montreal, including POP and Suoni Per Il Popolo, Alexander has performed elsewhere in Québec, Ontario, and the United States, with further touring slated for this fall. Her work has also taken the form of collaboration both within music and across disciplines. She is currently one half of experimental duo Urlapse with Joshua Bastien, and in 2016 she worked with visual artists Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau and choreographer Sarah Wendt to compose and perform a live score for their work The Rules, debuted at Montréal’s OFFTA Festival.
Outside of music performance, Alexander has worked in curatorial and academic capacities, giving guest lectures at Concordia University on the history of musique concrète and tape music as well as on the representation and visibility of women in electronic and experimental music. For a one-month residency at McGill University’s CKUT radio station, she hosted the weekly experimental music program If You Got Ears and will continue to appear as a regular guest on the show for future editions. While working to prepare her MUTEK debut, Alexander is also crafting a future release that functions as a reimagining of the “DJ tools” format, her first released work as buffalo MRI in over two years.
You can hear her hosting CKUT’s MUTEK x Montreal Sessions on Tuesday, August 22nd from 3:00pm to 5:00pm.