Name: Maxime Corbeil-Perron aka Courant Zéro
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Composer, electronic musician, label founder at Kohlenstoff
Current Release: Courant Zéro's new album Solari is out via Constellation.

If you enjoyed this Courant Zéro interview, and would like to know more about his music and upcoming live performances, visit Maxime Corbeil-Perron's official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and bandcamp.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

With eyes closed, shapes and colours, I’ve definitely felt/seen that, both as a listener and a composer/performer. Strong feelings of space, light, texture and movement as well. Listening to certain types of music also brings me in a semi-dream, transcendent state.

I remember lying in the sun as a teenager, half-awake listening to John Coltrane’s “My Favourite Things.” Something about the rhythm, the energy, and the modal colours, were bringing me into another state of consciousness.



That is a high I still chase while listening, performing and composing music.

With eyes open, I really enjoy the feeling of movement while listening to music: walking, driving, or in transit. The feeling of light, warmth, shifting hues, in relation to sound, or the connections our brain and heart make between all of them.

The space and context can also give you a totally different read on a work you’ve heard a thousand times before.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

It always feels to me that headphones are such an intimate experience while listening to music to a stereo system … the space, the power, the dynamics it occupies, it is so different.

I also find that it depends on the music you’re listening to. Some music will do better on headphones, while other types of more “speaker oriented” will sound way more interesting with some acoustic space to expand into.

I find that listening to music both ways definitely reveals different things in the music.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who composes instrumental music, but the human voice really gets to me still. You can understand so much from a person just by listening to their voice and truly listening to their words.

I’m not even talking about some virtuoso singer … just hearing people talk … We carry so much in our voices.

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

I find the endless audio/data stream pouring out of people’s devices really tiring, on so many levels.

In terms of sound that I could listen to for hours on end, one of my more moving/surprising sonic experiences in recent times was when I was biking at night, coming back from a residency space in Leuven called Werktank. I randomly stumbled upon what seemed to be thousands of birds singing … It was truly overwhelming to hear in the night. I only had my phone to record it, but I managed to include it on the first track of my upcoming record.

Another one was walking around an empty, stormy Zocalo with my friends/organizers of the Fisura Film Festival in CDMX and hearing the dark rumbling of the bells reverberating over the square. I could have listened to this for hours. I’ve managed to include the recording of it in a “companion release” that will be out in a few months after the new upcoming LP comes out.

In general, the sounds of thunder, wind through the leaves, instrumental harmonics, some instrumental multiphonics, feedback, and fire crackling are all things I’d gladly listen to for hours.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Hospitals are fascinating in terms of sounds. I worked as a janitor in hospitals for a couple of years to pay for my tuition fees. I used to do some field recordings during my breaks walking around with some small microphones taped to my glasses.

I would come home with these cinematic traveling sequences of machines, voices, prayer, spaces, joy, and sadness. It was really moving to listen to it. I never did anything with them because it felt too private and personal to share, it felt disrespectful to use in a project. I did isolate some amazing Eraserhead sounding bursting pipes and machines, though.

Other than that, I find most machinery, spaces, and matter in general can be extremely surprising once recorded and amplified. There is a rich sonic world that we do not hear unless we go up close to things with headphones and a microphone.

Even instruments have this other level of sonic detail, which we can’t really perceive while listening to them from a distance.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

I know anechoic chambers can freak people out, but I found them to be sort of calming!

I always find caves to be so surprising acoustically. We get used to it while we are in there, but if you stop for a moment, you realize just how complex the reverberations of sound are.

Whenever I’m in a cave, I always wish I’d brought a microphone or an instrument, or that I had a nice singing voice.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?

I had a band where we’d rehearse in the basement of a repurposed textile factory here in Montreal. There was something gritty and slightly spooky about it, and it definitely affected our music. We loved that place until it flooded and had to leave in a hurry.

Another place I loved working in the past was this makeshift studio I had in Clermont-Ferrand a couple of years ago. The people from the festival, Videoformes, had set me up in a huge choir room with a skylight and a grand piano, and I could blast music until the early hours of the morning. Good, nice, creative time … though really bleak at night!

I mixed some of the upcoming record at CMMAS in Mexico. CMMAS is this amazing place — a monastery-turned-military base turned-bus station-turned cultural center in Morelia. They have high-end studios there and an amazing group of people supporting it. Truly a unique space.

But this record is mostly what you would call a “bedroom record.” I made the most of it in my previous apartment, which has probably been gentrified over already. With COVID/moving/other types of projects, I honestly haven’t been in an actual recording studio in a long time.

I really miss the energy-charged feeling of these places, and that feeling of capturing a precious and unique performance, creating time, and making something special with people.

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

It really does.

For this record, it was often about crafting sounds and carefully mixing their spectrums to create timbres which I could build melody or harmony from. Then it was often about hearing ways to connect sounds and following a spectral “thread’’to tie things together, or shifting the general spectrum of the composition, and then seeing how it would resonate with me emotionally and intuitively.

Then new materials can come in and introduce new techniques or approaches that can, as an example, be akin to college, or cut-ups, or reference generative rhythms, or noisy rubles. These new sounds/ideas affect whatever has been already placed. A lot of back and forth for a while until I feel like things have taken form.

Working with sound is a very abstract process, and I find that analogies from more “material,” or visual processes, such as sculpture, painting or film, sometime help me visualize and grasp what I’m doing. It also inspires me to approach things differently.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

I’m really not an expert on this subject, but I think, like with any other animals, we are deeply affected by noise pollution.

We get our signals-crossed. Thoughts get drowned out. Our feelings, intuitions and instincts get confused … and a healthy acoustic environment can definitely help us relax our nervous system and heal ourselves.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

Wind and rustling leaves bring me a sense of peace. I used to listen to it a lot when I was a kid. I was always an anxious person, and that definitely relaxed me.

Same with crashing waves. Strong winds. Storms. Thunder.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

Absolutely, people totally develop their own creative language to communicate with animals, I’ve definitely done this with my dogs and cats in the past.

And vice versa, animals will find ways to communicate with you.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

I try to protect my hearing as much as I can. I have tinnitus that shows up once in a while, but I think it is related to my nervous system, as it is always in periods of high fatigue/stress.

In my case, rest is usually the key. I really feel for anyone struggling with these issues.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I wouldn’t say that I agree with that. Haha. While I love listening to music for hours on end, I do appreciate quiet and silence. My ears and mind need time to, again, rest and breathe.

I also find that my listening is always at it’s best after a period of silence. Nothing quite like listening to your work/mixes with fresh ears to know if you’ve been going in the right direction or not.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I find that when you actually listen, truly, to people, is when you really understand them … and I feel it cuts both ways. Actually, listening to someone can reveal a lot more than whatever image they’re trying to throw at you.

We’ve become this image-obsessed society where everything is about holding people’s attention for a couple of seconds… Listening has really taken a back seat because it requires time! It doesn’t fit as well in a society that’s obsessed with consuming shards or information. We’re not really listening; we’re just consuming and forgetting whatever the algorithm is serving us this instant.

So, I guess I believe our world would be better if we listened more.