Biography
Nolan Hildebrand is a composer and noise artist based in Toronto, Canada. He composes electroacoustic, instrumental, and acousmatic music, and performs in his solo noise project, BLACK GALAXIE.
His work synthesizes noise music with contemporary composition practices to create music that is intense, colorful, and viscerally engaging. This synthesis manifests sonically through saturation, excess, and physicality, often with a touch of playfulness and absurdity. His creative output integrates chaotic feedback networks, open graphic scores, spatialized sound, computer-assisted composition, and interactive systems.
Nolan’s music has been performed at major festivals around the world including Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), International Computer Music Conference (China), Forum Wallis (Switzerland), reMusik (Russia), Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend (USA), and rainy days festival (Luxembourg). He has worked with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, ECM+ Ensemble, MolOt Ensemble, United Instruments of Lucilin, Quatour Bozzini, XelmYa Ensemble, Jonny Axelsson, Nick Photinos, and has participated in masterclasses with Panayiotis Kokoras, Stefan Prins, Ana Sokolovic, and Malin Bång.
His research has been published in Organised Sound, the International Computer Music Conference proceedings, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference proceedings, and the Korean Electro Acoustic Music Society’s Annual Conference proceedings.
Artistic Statement
I use expressive noise as a core material to create music that is loud, visceral, chaotic, and euphoric. I have always been drawn to the physical, sublime, and confrontational aspects of noise, and the capacity for sound’s ability to challenge perception and construct immersive, physical listening environments. Within these physical listening environments, I seek to (as Artaud said) “assault the senses and pulverize the audience’s feelings”.
My contemporary compositions draw extensively from different popular (and unpopular) music practices, most notably noise music and extreme metal music. Drawing from these genres, my compositions foreground distortion, error, intensity, and structural instability as primary musical parameters.
Ultimately, using expressive noise which draws other noisy musical practices creates a new paradigm in the field of contemporary composition. History shows that noise consistently challenges and reshapes music—from Schoenberg’s “emancipation of dissonance,” to musique concrète, to distortion in rock music. In each case, noise destabilized tradition but ultimately enriched musical practice. In my practice I seek to continue pushing further in this direction, enriching the body of art music and expanding what audiences perceive to be contemporary music.
