
Free
Water Road
November 24 → April 1
The PHI Centre building comes to life with an interactive multimedia installation of a motion-activated river on its four-story windows on Saint-Pierre Street
PHI Centre
Space A
315 Saint-Paul St West
Montreal, Quebec, H2Y 2A3
Doors: 7 pm
Music: 8 pm
Price in advance: $15
Price at the door: $20
Taxes and fees not included
Before visiting, please review some essential information about the visit, including details on accessibility at the Centre.
For more details on safety measures in place at the PHI Centre, visit our COVID-19 page.
Celebrated Canadian artist presents experimental folk songs from latest album Say Laura.
Opening act: Cédric Dind-Lavoie
Eric Chenaux is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven full-length solo albums on the Montréal imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk and out-jazz compositions increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. Chenaux has been called “a musician like no other” by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo work praised by The Quietus as “stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time.” Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: “A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos.”
Chenaux was a key figure in Toronto’s fertile indie and avant/improv music scenes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, co-founding the experimental music label Rat-drifting in 2001 and documenting a dynamic cross-section of Toronto music iconoclasts over the ensuing decade, including several projects in which he played. He has released collaborative records on labels like Okraïna, Avatar, Grapefruit and Three:four and has performed and recorded with countless artists, including Ryan Driver, Sandro Perri, Eloïse Decazes, Michelle McAdorey, Nick Fraser, Martin Arnold, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Brodie West, Han Bennink, Christine Abdelnour, Michael Moore, Josephine Foster, Martin Tetrault and many more.
Chenaux also composes for film and contemporary dance, including a long-standing association with conceptual filmmaker Eric Cazdyn for his solo music, and in recurring collaboration with multi-media and sound installation artist Marla Hlady. Eric Chenaux has been based in France since 2011.
It is on an old 4-track recorder that multi-instrumentalist and composer Cédric Dind-Lavoie, then a teenager, discovered his passion for studio recording. But what would occupy him the following years is a prolific career as a bassist/double-bassist, with a keen interest in West African Mandingo music (Balla Tounkara, Bolo Kan) and Québecois folklore (Bon Débarras, Yves Lambert).
More recently, Cédric came back to is roots as a producer (Kyra Shaughnessy, Bon Débarras) and as a composer for theatre and contemporary dance shows (Bigico, Les Archipels). Meanwhile, he has released two albums of original compositions: presenting Middle-Eastern-flavoured jazz pieces with the Mismar ensemble in 2015, then, a first solo release in 2018 on the British label Preserved Sound and featuring nine neoclassical inspired piano compositions.
This journey eventually led him to Archives (2021), an effort joining folklore to ambient and introspective music, which has the particularity of featuring French-Canadian archival recordings around which he deploys his arrangements. As if Cédric Dind-Lavoie had been able to slip through the cracks of time to meet these voices, hear their stories and play with them.
Free
The PHI Centre building comes to life with an interactive multimedia installation of a motion-activated river on its four-story windows on Saint-Pierre Street
Free
An ongoing collection of contemporary artworks, accessible and free at the PHI Centre
New Programming
Tune out the everyday noise and lose yourself in Montréal’s new immersive listening room
Free
Terms of Use brings together works that explore the impact of technologies on the definition, construction, and (re)framing of individual and collective selves
Free
As part of the exhibition Terms of Use, Quentin VerCetty and the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art invite you to take part in the Missing Black Technofossils Here augmented reality (AR) walking tour
Free
Visible from outside the Foundation’s windows for the first week of our exhibition Terms of Use, the installation will be open to the public from March 16, 2023, after the first creative activity facilitated by the PHI Foundation’s Education team
Coming Soon
An exhibition comprising a British immersive installation and four award-winning Taiwanese virtual reality works that take us through personal, empirical and historical experiences