“’In the beginning was the Word …’ provokes one to ask, where was the image?”
—Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning”

The typically tedious visual experience of attending an electronic music performance produces a perennial problem for audiences: what to do with one’s eyes.

For some reason, we find guitarists and drummers, keyboardists and vocalists striking poses and pulling faces more interesting to look at than producers and DJs twiddling knobs and riding faders.

Various contemporary artists have attempted to address this problem more or less spectacularly. Amon Tobin plays from within a three-dimensional cityscape. Tim Hecker disappears into a cloud of fluorescent fog. Autechre turn the lights off entirely. Most pedestrian musicians usually just project some sort of screensaver-like images to distract spectators from the fact that the cake is already baked in the proverbial oven.

But not Seulement. The pseudonym of the Montreal-based Mathieu Arsenault, Seulement embellishes his live modular synthesizer sets by cutting shapes — quite literally.

While Arsenault is busy behind a bank of machines, doing whatever it is that he does, hypnotic geometric patterns pulse and flicker away on a large screen, assailing his audience’s retinas with abstract, rapid-fire, stop-motion animation that simultaneously casts him in a glowing and dramatic silhouette. The solution is seizure-inducing and unsettling and ultimately satisfying.

“The strobing effect is not digital,” Arsenault explains to me over coffee on a recent Thursday afternoon. “It’s made by hand. So, let’s say I move a triangle. I move an actual cardboard cutout triangle on a light tablet. And then I use that animation as a guide to make the same thing but with another triangle shaped hole, the same size. And then I alternate them. So, the positive/negative flickering effect is made by hand.”

I am fascinated to learn about Arsenault’s handcrafted process in producing these captivating images, having been impressed by his audiovisual show, entitled Bricolage Architecture, presented in late March at one of Ateliers Belleville’s renowned ECHOS nights.

Young stars are born in explosions of light. And there was a collective sense that evening that we were all witnessing some extraordinary interstellar supernova.

In person, Arsenault, 42, has an unassuming, unpretentious vibe, shy and polite amongst the caffeinated braggadocio of Caffè Italia’s regular crowd. Still, he adopts a proper Rockstar stance on stage, to the approval of his growing legion of admirers.

It may be that his homespun visuals relieve the pressure of being publicly scrutinized. Nonetheless, Arsenault projects a measured conviction in his ideas and work both as a musician and visual artist, neither under- nor overconfident, but refreshingly commensurate with his manifold talents.

“I’m really happy about this show,” he beams. “It’s a new direction for me. It’s the first time I use video for a show. It’s also the first time I don’t sing on stage. The previous show I toured (for the album EX PO) instead was synchronized with lights and had more vocal performance elements. But the more instrumental music of Bricolage Architecture is going to be on my next record. It’s the new chapter. I’m really excited about it. If it’s more exciting for me, it’s more exciting for the people listening.”

The music side of Arsenault’s routine consists of syncopated analogue synthesizer oscillations constructed with a Pop compositional sensibility. “They are definitely songs,” says Arsenault.

“For this project, I wanted to explore electronic music without having to rely on my voice as the main focus. It was a challenge for me because all I ever did was write songs. Even though I don’t sing on top of it, they’re still songs. That’s how I structure music in my head.”

Arsenault grew up on Montreal’s South Shore, drawing comics and listening predominantly to metal before drifting in his late teens towards electronic music. He played in a band called Technical Kidman which combined live and preprogrammed elements that provide an early clue to his solo work.

“It was kind of a weird name for the band,” he tells me, “because it sounds funny, but the music was so not funny. It’s hard to perform electronic music. It’s not ready out-of-the-box. With that band, we always wanted to avoid using a click. We had a very elastic feel.”

The “extra-dimensional” Montreal record label Mothland booked Technical Kidman for their first Distorsion Festival, and Arsenault has been associated with that collective ever since. He cites three other pivotal moments that guided him on his current trajectory.

“I saw Radiohead when they performed the Kid A / Amnesiac tour,” he recalls. “And that’s when I realized that maybe I didn’t want to make metal music. And after that, it’s when I listened to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I bought Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. I was 18 or 19 years old and I was like, ‘oh, I didn’t know you could make music like that.’ I had never heard anything like that. And then a bit later I saw Ryoji Ikeda perform at Elektra. At that moment, my band was making music and touring a bit. But when I saw that, I remember telling myself, ‘Right now, I’m not doing this kind of stuff. But one day, I want to do these kinds of audiovisual performances.’”

Arsenault’s act will please fans of Tony Conrad and Alessandro Cortini, Paul Sharits and Caterina Barbieri. The rub is that interesting imagery doesn’t need music, and interesting music doesn’t need imagery.

Audiovisual pieces can sometimes come off a bit like an everything sandwich where more is not necessarily better. But Seulement is more like a marriage of two equivalent and complementary artforms that could easily stand on their own but strengthen each other by virtue of their merger.

If there appears to be an academic angle to Arsenault’s work, that is because he is currently enrolled in the doctoral programme in Digital Music at Université de Montréal. “Bricolage Architecture is actually my master’s thesis,” he confesses.

“To me, the theory always comes as I make the work. The work rarely comes from a theoretical or conceptual place. Even though I really like conceptual work, it’s not what I do. The conceptual aspect of the work will always reveal itself. But I come from a more Rock music background. I make music in a very intuitive way. I always try to make something that makes me feel something. That’s the only guideline I have.”

Analogous to Arsenault’s craftwork cutout animation, he encourages and embraces defects and blemishes in his sonic production. “It’s bodily induced noise,” he explains.

“Instead of using oscillators as the basic material of the music I make, I use loops of my voice. And loops of flute — recorder flute. I’m not a good flute player. So, it’s very irregular. Even though I try my best to sing perfectly or play flute perfectly, it will never be as regular as oscillators.”

The post-digital tendencies in Arsenault’s output hint at glitch aesthetics and the fallibility of machines in an era when we expect functional seamlessness from our interfaces.

“I’ve performed the work in different parts of the world, and some people are touched by it,” Arsenault muses, “and they’re surprised that they’re touched by it. If you think about it on paper, it doesn’t seem like something very touching. It’s geometric shapes that flicker with synthy music. But I think because it’s all assembled by hand, it shows a certain vulnerable aspect. The fact that I try my best to emulate what the machine can do, and fail, is something that is very tragic. To me, it speaks to the search for perfection. I strive for — and a lot of people are trying to be — perfect. And this project is a way to cope that I cannot make a perfect work.”

What constitutes perfection for you, I ask?

“That’s a good question,” Arsenault replies. “I don’t know. Perhaps imperfection is perfection.”◼︎

Seulement performs Bricolage Architecture 17 April 2026 at CIRMMT’s Multimedia Room, 2nd floor, Elizabeth Wirth Music Building, 527 Sherbrooke O.

_{Cover image: Mathieu Arsenault photographed for NicheMTL.}