About Christopher Bissonnette

Christopher Bissonnette began his career studying fine art at the University of Windsor. Majoring in video and multimedia, he began to produce video that was inseparable from sound, and sound that produced contextual support to the abstracted imagery of his visual work. Bissonnette experienced the rise of the Detroit electronic music scene in the early 1990s, and began to develop an aural vocabulary of his own. He experimented with "purist" techno sound, working with analogue synths and rhythm machines.This was ultimately unfulfilling. In 1996 Bissonnette teamed up with Mark Laliberte to form Disseminator Audio, which produced hybrid performances of sequenced tracks, turntable experiments and spoken word. Bissonnette refined this vocabulary producing audio, video, and installation work. In 1997 Laliberte and Bissonnette began working with Windsor artist Chris McNamara, founding Thinkbox, a media collective focused on the intersection of art and popular electronic music. Thinkbox produces art in a variety of media and spaces from art galleries to nightclubs and have fronted a series of limited edition, themed compilations, beginning with Settings. In early 2004 the collective released Guitar, a collection of the members manipulated interpretations of prerecorded guitar sessions. In 2004 Thinkbox was invited to perform a showcase at Mutek in Montreal. In addition to a collaborative performance with the other five members, Bissonnette offered a solo piece derived from a body of work that would eventually be comprised in his solo debut release Periphery. In April of 2008, Bissonnette released his sophomore release, In Between Words. This new release is collection of works that continue Christopher Bissonnette's explorations into orchestral and spatial acoustics. Cultivating an increasing interest in field recording and found sounds, Bissonnette has woven spatial ambience into these new compositions, while still concentrating on moments of near empty space between 'instruments'. Inspired by the continuous din, the constant low-level hum of urban background noise, interspersed with all manner of mechanically created sounds, Bissonnette finds in this a near-melodic soundtrack to his daily life. On the final track "Jour Et Nuit", this seems most apparent as one can almost hear sparse traffic of a highway in the sweeping long tones. Using orchestral sound sources as well as recording his own sounds to manipulate and process, Bissonnette has crafted a symphony of six movements, with melodies as ghostly apparitions that fade in and out of view. Recorded as spontaneous mixes, these compositions maintain a sense of organic fluidity while creating passages of escalating tension.