France Jobin has been exploring quantum theory for many years now, an interest that has shown up in her compositions, sound installations, and work with VR. But the pandemic finally afforded the Montreal-based minimalist composer time for deeper study with a personal brain trust of physicists she’d assembled over the years. Jobin recently released Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2) on the great Room40 label.We sat down in Montreal to discuss her formative sonic experiences, her origin in a blues band, her interest in physics, and a growing body of audio-visual work with Markus Heckmann. (Joseph Sannicandro)

Episode 37: QUANTUM BLUES- with France Jobin

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Interview recorded in Montreal, May  2023
Produced and mixed in New York, July 2024

“It is always from others that we learn, from others different from ourselves.”
                                          – Carlo Rovelli

France Jobin tells me that she’s “just a medium,” guided by her close listening to spaces, field-recordings, collaborators, and a braintrust of physicists. This of course downplays her own significant achievements, but such entanglements have been a key part of her artistic identity in the 25 years since her solo debut as I8U. France has always set out to learn from those different from herself, whether that comes from people, sounds, spaces, or ideas. This strikes me as fitting considering she is a French-Canadian living in Montreal, Quebec, a thoroughly bilingual city where everything has (at least) two names, where every institution seems to have its double. 

Jobin is a sound artist, composer, and curator Her recordings have appeared on venerable labels including LINE, Dragon’s Eye, Mego, and Room40, and she has also released duo recordings with Richard Chartier, Fabio Perletta, and Stephan Matthieu. Her compositions combine field-recording and synthesizers, the latter of which have been particularly shown off in her #synthporn series, following a number of residencies in Australia and Sweden and elsewhere. Her latest album, Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2), was released on Room 40 earlier this summer, and is the latest exploration of her longrunning interest in quantum physics.

Jobin studied classical piano as a child, but was uninterested in pursuing music written by dead composers. Her childhood experience with synchronized swimming made more of an impact on her relation to sound, listening for her coach’s tapped signals diffused underwater, performing accompanied by the music of Pierre Henry. The musique concrète pioneer composed much music for dance, so perhaps this isn’t as much of an adventurous choice as it might first seem, but hearing this unusual music filtered underwater helped the young France to better understand the physics, as well as the semiotics, of sonic space.

As France says in this episode, “Spaces speak to us if we are open enough to listen.” This informs her approach to the registration and utilization of field-recordings as well as her work with sound installations. She rarely arrives with a plan, but instead lets the space make suggestions to her. In our conversation she describes the different approaches she took realizing works in a prison in Quebec and in a former factory in the small Italian city of Città Sant’Angelo, organized by our mutual friend Fabio Perletta. France deploys acoustic space to reveal something about each particular site’s history, devising strategies to encourage her auditors to move through space and adopt new modes of listening, for instance, drawn by faint sounds into areas of the architecture they wouldn’t otherwise have ventured into.

Unexpected pathways are something of a recurrent theme in Jobin’s career. She credits her knowledge of acoustics to her earlier career playing keys with an electric blues band in a variety of bars. Those experiences continue to inform her approach to sound installations, as she adapts her contributions to the particularities of each site. The transition from blues musician to experimental musician seems unlikely, but France stresses that both styles share an attention to minimalism and dynamics. As a keyboard player, Jobin had to be adaptable, sometimes fulfilling the role of the organ and other times the brass section. This led to an interest in synthesizers, including the Roland D-50, Korg Poly-800, and E-mu Proteus. That last caught the attention of a local experimental musician who invited her to jam, changing the course of her interest in music.

All of her work since I8U’s 10³³CM (Room40, 2009) have been influenced by quantum physics, the title of that work referencing the theoretical size of a string in string theory. While not in any sense trained as a scientist, quantum theory helped shift France’s way of thinking, not just as an artist but also in her personal life. She describes, for instance, how learning about shadow photons helped her through her grief, transforming how she views life and death. Quantum led Jobin away from thinking about casualty in terms of if/then and towards a philosophy of and/or, leading her to embrace imprecision, uncertainly and chaos fitting for one enamored by working with modular synthesizers.

In recent years, however, she felt the urge to level up her studies and go beyond mere inspiration. Wanting to be able to speak with confidence and scientific validity, slowly assembled an informal international braintrust of physicists she’s met randomly over the years, who helped her deepen her studies during the pandemic. Her most recent interest is QBism, or Quantum Bayesianism, “an interpretation that takes an agent’s actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory,” reflected in work such as “Superposition” on  Infinite Probabilities. These recent studies have also influenced the direction she would take with Entanglement, a multi-work audio-visual project in collaboration with the visual artist Markus Heckmann.

Resisting the fad of interactive or participatory audio-visual work, her partnership with Heckmann has included live audio-visual performances in festivals around the world. When the pandemic shut down performance opportunities, Montreal’s Mutek festival invited the duo to adapt the work for Oculus Virtual Reality headsets, presenting new challenges and opportunities. Last year, during the 2023 edition of Mutek in Montreal, the duo presented yet another iteration of the work in the 360-degree SATosphere

This interview was recorded on McTavish Street in Montreal, overlooking McGill University’s sportsball field at Rutherford Park. I’ve preserved some of the background ambience, including the sounds of music, conversation, and sports, also switching occasionally between microphones, in what hopefully reads as a tribute to France’s work and interest in quantum. 

LINKS
France Jobin
Bandcamp
Markus Heckmann
LINE
Dragon’s Eye
Room40
Mutek

TRACKLISTARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR)

France Jobin – “Superposition [excerpt]” (Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2), Room40, 2024)
SP INTRO
Christopher Tyng – “Futurama Theme” (Futurama, 1999)
Pierre Henry / Michel Colombier – “Messe Pour Le Temps Présent: Psyché Rock” (Les Jerks Électroniques De La Messe Pour Le Temps Présent Et Musiques Concrètes Pour Maurice Béjart, Philips, 1968)
I8U (France Jobin) – “29 Palms [excerpt]” (29 Palms, Dragon’s Eye, 2010)
France Jobin + Fabio Perletta – “Parallel” (Mirror Neurons, Dragon’s Eye, 2015)
Son House – “Forever On My Mind” [1964] (Forever On My Mind, Easy Eye Sound, 2022)
Marc Nerenberg – “Cocaine Blues [edit]” (Live at the Yellow Door Hootenanny, Montreal, Nov 2023)
The Twelve Bar Bluesband – “Life is Hard (when you play the blues)” (Live at bluesmoose Radio, 2014)
I8U –  “10³³CM [excerpt]” (10³³CM,  Room40, 2009)
France Jobin and Stephan Mathieu – “Sea Song IV” (RADIANCE II: Music for the Answer, Schwebung, 2016)
France Jobin – “The Fluidity Of Time Does Not Exist” (The Fluidity Of Time Does Not Exist, Room40, 2021)
France Jobin – “Unified Quantum State” (Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2), Room 40, 2024)
France Jobin – “f6e36b” (Hues, SUPERPANG, 2021)
France Jobin  – “Random” (Source of Uncertainty, Luminous Drift, 2022)
France Jobin + Richard Chartier – “DUO 4” (DUO, Matter, 2018)
France Jobin – “Casino Music” (Casino Music, 2023)
France Jobin – “EMS Synthi” (#evenmoresynthporn, 2020)
France Jobin – “A little buchla something​.​.​.” (A little buchla something​.​.​., 2022)
France Jobin – “Dégel” (Symbiose X – Dix Ans De Musiques Expérimentales – Ten Years Of Experimental Music, [walnut + locust] – wl076, Symbiose, 2022)
France Jobin – “Superposition [excerpt]” (Infinite Probabilities (Particle 2), Room 40, 2024)

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Sound Propositions is written, recorded, mixed, and produced by Joseph Sannicandro.