In 1959, the British-Canadian poet Brion Gysin and his partner, Ian Sommerville, an electronics pioneer who was closely associated with William S. Burroughs and the group of artists known as the Beat Generation, conceived of a device called the Dreamachine.

A crudely constructed contraption, the Dreamachine was little more than a cardboard cylinder with cutout abstract shapes placed upon a turntable, with a 100-watt lightbulb positioned in its center.

As the turntable was switched on, stroboscopic light patterns would flicker through the cylinder at a frequency intended to induce an alpha wave mental state. In addition, the Dreamachine could reportedly produce temporal distortions and other hallucinations and gained renowned cultural status with the rise in Burroughs’s popularity throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.

The stroboscopic flicker effect is fundamental to the Montreal-based academic and musician Nicolas Bernier’s latest album, entitled Visions Couleurs, set to be released 1 October 2024.

“The Dreamachine is part of my influences,” Bernier tells me during a recent telephone conversation. “It’s so simple. It’s just a piece of paper and a turntable and a light and it’s really working, that thing. It’s pretty impressive. I’m a big William S. Burroughs fan. I like to read — this is where I take all my ideas from, and how I get soaked in a topic. I was reading on all those flicker-induced hallucinations and theories of colour and it all just melted together in this project. Burroughs is definitely the author that marked my life the most.”

Notoriously, William S. Burroughs experimented with altered states, including the use of psychedelic drugs for their legendarily synesthetic potential. While not at all drug-induced, Bernier’s recording is a collection of psychedelic musical movements for modular synthesizer that aim to combine auditory and visual experience, producing impressions of colours from sound, and vice versa.

“This summer, I was reading Frontiers of Being, by Duncan B. Blewett. He was a psychologist who was doing this research group on LSD testing in a university in the ‘60s. He was one of the first people who wanted to make more scientific research into LSD. When I was younger and taking drugs a little bit,” Bernier admits, “I could just take a puff of a joint and see things — and hear things. Fun fact. So, this is why I can’t take recreational drugs.”

Bernier instead chose to dedicate his creative efforts to constructing an “idealized fantasy vision” of psychedelics, combining audio and video in an immersive and transcendent performance-based experience.

“I decided to make a visual part to the album as well, where I would play the colour on the synthesizer,” says Bernier. “We made a system where the synthesizer is controlling colours in a real-time projection. As I play, the colours are changing. There’s never a beat, but there’s always some kind of pulsation making the colours flicker.”

Bernier recorded Visions Couleurs at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Music’s experimental Laboratoire Formes – Ondes, where he additionally serves as professor and co-director. And he will premiere the album there in a free performance on 3 October.

“It’s going to be really intimate,” Bernier says. “It’s a small, maybe 50-person venue. You can’t get more niche than this.”

Bernier succeeded in composing an ambitious album that he could recreate more-or-less uniformly and structurally every time. “This is a challenge with modular synthesizer because it’s all a bit hectic. You turn one knob a little bit and all the sound will be changed,” Bernier explains.

Hailing from Gatineau, Quebec, Bernier was steeped in synthesizer-based music from an early age, listening to popular scores created for 1980s film and television. “I still have my tape of the Miami Vice soundtrack somewhere,” he laughs.

Yet by the early 1990s, Bernier’s tastes turned to more indie genres, albeit with a particularly Canadian slant.

“Furnaceface is still today among my favourite bands,” he says, “even if history forgot about them. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ That video changed a lot. That generation was going quickly from Metallica and this really macho Rock to Alternative music and Nirvana. Then, the transition went fast from Grunge to things like Portishead and Björk. That was my youth.”

Bernier relocated in 1999 to Montreal to complete an internship with Voir, the now-defunct French-language alt-monthly newspaper. “I started out studying marketing,” Bernier says, “but I was more interested in the web. I did an internship at Voir and worked there for a couple of years. It was just a three-month internship, but I’m still here, 25 years later.”

In the interim, Bernier completed a Ph.D. in Sonic Arts at the University of Huddersfield; released a series of well-received albums spanning Musique Concrète, field recording, and electronic musical traditions; created scores for cinema and stage, including Structures Infinies – Light Object, which was shortlisted in 2017 for the U.K. Aesthetica Art Prize; performed at prestigious international festivals such as Sonar in Spain, Transmediale in Germany, and Montreal’s own Mutek and Elektra; and taught in the Digital Music program at UdeM.

Visions Couleurs marks another milestone for Bernier, who immerses himself deeply in every creative endeavour he undertakes. Although the recording is not monumental in scale, it is widescreen in scope, and technicolour in its aesthetic sensibility.

“There’s no orchestration,” Bernier confesses. “There’s not much editing. I didn’t make it like super big or anything. It’s me playing and that’s about it. But it’s a synthesizer piece that’s really played. I’m not triggering sequences. I’m really doing a lot. I feel it’s a way to approach synthesizer that is a bit less common. I’m doing something more colourful and playful. I want to make it joyful — that’s one thing.”

During a rehearsal for the live performance, Bernier divulges that the Burroughs-inspired flicker effect of the video images even managed to destabilize him, if only momentarily.

“At one point it became overwhelming. But it’s cool. I just felt lost in my own thing. I hope I don’t pass out in the colours.”◼︎

Visions Couleurs is released 1 October 2024.