Jeremy Young (CAN)

Jeremy Young is a maker of concrète electronic tape music from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Quebec. He is a member of the poetry_sound duo Cloud Circuit, the electroacoustic modern classical trio Sontag Shogun, and library music waveriders Associated Sine Tone Services. His forthcoming record, Cablcar, is due out on 4 April, 2025 via Halocline Trance.

Making use of a sine and square wave oscillator system, analog 1/4" tape and open reel loops, filtered radio and EMF signal, and foley-inspired sound treatments from amplified surfaces and objects, Young's improvisational and compositional techniques are influenced by Cagean aleatoricism as well as haptics-based praxis and deep listening. His McLuhan-esque approach lies in combining the physical treatment of audio signal (piezo mic'd objects and surfaces, manipulations of tape and tone via texture and voltage) with complex musical content, to create sonic narratives that are anchored by the media on which they are recorded, edited, and/or played back. Young’s live performances are improvisational and grid-less.

In 2021, Young released his début solo LP, Amaro, featuring multidisciplinary artists Vito Ricci, Ida Toninato, Markus Floats, Pauline Kim Harris, Johannes Bergmark, Deanna Radford, Dolphin Midwives, and Tomonari Nishikawa, to wide acclaim across Canada and beyond. Recordings since Amaro (2019-2024) have iterated on variations within the “Amaro system” of oscillators and tape he developed in 2019 as a compositional tool.

In 2020, Young's work was selected to appear in Francisco López's kaleidoscopic audio exhibition, "AUDIOSFERA: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020," at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Also in 2020, Young and Radford (Cloud Circuit) were invited to contribute a multimedia work of sound, text and visual art to Berlin’s Occulto Magazine's Issue 7. The resulting "Static studies: four ersatz phrases in dactylic hexameter for sea (s) and cloud (c)," led directly to a 2023 invitation by the Prima Vista Festival to become “Utopian Ambassadors” in residence in Tartu, Estonia.

In 2022, Young was invited by the TAKKK Kunstikeskus environmental art center to begin work on a multi-year sonic artwork to be installed in-situ in 2023-24. That same year, Young was invited by the Politécnico de Leiria in Portugal to give a master class in tape splicing and performance. In 2016, Young was commissioned by the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève to compose a full-length work of sound based on their massive ethnomusicological sound archives, called The Poetics of Time-Space. Young's follow-up work, 2018's Dizzy, Congested Musick, continues exploring some of the same themes as The Poetics, yet set to a dizzying sonic landscape of time-warped found vinyl samples. In 2014, he was awarded a Media Artists' Assistance Grant by Wave Farm (NYSCA) to create 125 unique cassette loop pieces and commissioning sound artists to create new work using them as source material. The audio is archived online at The Chants Beneath Project here.

Young has been involved as a co-curator with continuing events series such as Adam Daudrich’s Présences Ambiantes, Jann Tomaro's sonic guided meditation series, Practice, and Jesse Perlstein's roaming graphic score group improvisations, BraidedSOUND, and as an invited curator for the Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival in Montreal, Quebec. In 2024, Young launched a music blog for album reviews called The Royal Editoryal.