Stefan Maier
Artist in Residence | February 2021
Artist, Sound Space | December 2022
Stefan Maier is a composer based in Vancouver, Canada — the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
His compositions, installations, and performances, examine emergent and historical sound technologies. Highlighting material instability and unruliness, his work explores the flows of sonic matter through sound systems, instruments, software, and bodies, to uncover alternate modes of authorship and listening possibilities within specific technologically-mediated situations.
Stefan works fluidly between contemporary classical music, sound art, experimental electronic music and installation. His work has been presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Kunsthal Aarhus, Ultima festival (Oslo), SPOR festival (Aarhus), G(o)ng Tomorrow (Copenhagen), and Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Utrecht), among many others. In 2017 he received a Mayor’s Art Award from the City of Vancouver and was a 2019 Macdowell Colony Fellow. Stefan currently lectures in electronic music at Simon Fraser University. His debut record Deviant Chain will be released later this year on Anómia.
Tractatus de Umbra manus (1447): The Fifth Hammer
Tractatus de Umbra manus (1447): The Fifth Hammer — (for prerecorded Organ, Cornetto, Recorders, Theorbo, Renaissance Trombone, Choir and Percussion) examines the history of mystical spatial composition during the turn of the renaissance.
From the Venetian polychoral tradition, to the implied divine spatialities in the work of Guillaume DuFay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores, the work implicitly draws on this lineage through the use of musical instruments and temperaments from the late middle-ages. It is a part of a larger ongoing project in speculative medievalism, that consists of a growing body of forged compositions that explore magical and occult musical practices originating in the pre-modern era.
Above all, the series is inspired by conductor-musicologist Björn Schmelzer’s proclamation of the monstrosity of early music — that its practice might be best understood as a form of sounding necromancy
Orchid Mantis
Created in collaboration with Michelle Mackenzi - Orchid Mantis is a sonic study of a speculative, post-human habitat described in an essay by Benjamin Bratton. Composer and educator Stefan Maier enlists the novel possibilities afforded by 4DSOUND and the tactile specificites of infrasonics through Lobe’s vibrational transducers to explore human listening as a non-linear process, the physiological limits of the human ear, perceptual paradoxes, and impossible spatial geometries.
