Marsh Chapel Experiment

Marsh Chapel Experiment is structured as an expedition into tempo and motion manipulation...from the perspective of a 1960s special effects designer...on psilocybin. Stop motion, slow motion, fast motion, blurring, freezing (frozen in time) are visual effects that are recontextualized or reinterpreted in a musical environment in an attempt to convey what these effects might sound like. In this work these effects are taken to the extreme, revealing technical flaws and defects. The stop motion is missing too many frames and is erratic and choppy. The slow motion is hyper slow, stretching, pixelating and ultimately damaging the picture beyond recognition. The blurring effects occur at inopportune moments for far too long, distorting and obscuring the source material. The editing is rapid and relentless resulting in a jumpy picture, which sometimes completely blacks out. At specific points during the work ghetto blasters play back cassette tapes–also flawed and defective. The content on the tapes is primarily background vocals extracted from karaoke tapes, many of which are tracks from the late 1950s and 1960s. The tapes interweave with the ensemble to embellish this sonic emulation of exploited visual effects.

In 1995, Nicole Lizée received a Bachelor of Music degree from Brandon University with a double major in piano and composition. In 2001 she received a Master of Music degree in composition from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where she studied with Denys Bouliane and John Rea. Her Masters thesis consisted of a work for large ensemble and solo turntablist that featured scratch DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting.

Nicole has received commissions from several artists and ensembles including I'Orchestre Métropolitan du Grand Montréal, Ensemble Kore, CBC, Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal, Bradyworks Ensemble, Lithium Ensemble and I'Association des Orchestres de Jeunes du Québec.

Nicole has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. In 2004 she was named a finalist (3rd place) in the Jules-Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for the work Left Brain/Right Brain. In 2002 she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize and in 2004 she was nominated for an Opus Prize.

For more information about Nicole Lizee, click here.