The scene: a theater in Glasgow. Rows of fold-down seats tier up from a stage where a young woman looking like a DJ stands behind a console. The venue is best known for its pantomimes, musical productions and interviews with respected authors, but tonight something very special is about to happen.

The audience sit quietly, respectfully, watching the stage, watching the screen above the performer with its view of four transparent discs on the deck below. Then it begins. The lights dim and the woman starts to spin the discs in front of her. They flicker into life, emitting a radiant light and strange mesmeric sounds—pulses, beats, hums—as they revolve.

The woman is Myriam Bleau—a multi-media artist, composer, musician and performer from Quebec—who last month astounded her Mitchell Theater audience at the Sonica music festival with her soundscape Soft Revolvers. Described as an “audiovisual performance for 4 spinning tops,” Soft Revolvers (2014) creates “an electronic music composition and the motion data collected by sensors – placed inside the tops – informs musical algorithms.”

With their large circular spinning bodies and their role as music playing devices, the interfaces strongly evoke turntables and DJ culture, hip hop and dance music. LEDs placed inside the tops illuminate the body of the objects in a precise counterpoint to the music, creating stunning spinning halos

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It’s compelling and astonishing, but the obvious question is how does it all work?

In an interview with Maintenant Festival, Myriam explained how it is all “quite simple”—a Wi-Fi chip enables each disc or “rotor” to give out light and sound via “a Pure Data patch (a visual programming language)” on her laptop. Using data from gyroscopes, Myriam is then able to “generate musical processes: for example percussive sounds that accelerate and decelerate or transpositions of voice samples.” In turn the brightness of the LEDs inside each rotor follows the sounds emitted. The louder—the brighter, the more rhythmic—the faster the flicker.

But this is just one of this talented woman’s compositions. Myriam’s most recent piece Autopsy.Glass has a microphone transmitting the sound of a wine glass being slowly shattered by a vice. The sounds—unnerving, visceral, thrilling—differ depending on whether the vice is tightened or slackened. Myriam describes the piece as “sometimes delicate, sometimes violent.”
 

 
An earlier work, the audiovisual performance/installation Photonaton (2103), Myriam used three incandescent lightbulbs which flicker on and off to create an electronic symphony.
 

 
Last year, Kit Monsters voted Myriam’s performance at the Ircam, Music Tech Fest, in Paris as the second best gig of 2014—only beaten by the Sleaford Mods. Myriam is still studying for a Masters degree at the University of Montreal, but her acclaimed performances that integrate hip hop, electronica, pop experimental and noise at festivals across Europe and Canada have made Myriam Bleau one of the most exciting young sonic artists on the scene. Check her website for more.