Marc-Antoine Barbier is a french-canadian composer from Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Alongside his bands, Totalement Sublime and Choses Sauvages, he is a composer for cinema, television and theatre. He released is first solo album Musée des espèces on October 3rd 2025 on L.A. label Not Not Fun Records. His ambient / fourth-world style explores fictives eco-systems through modular manipulation and wind instruments performances.
The ‘soundscape ecologies’ of Montreal composer Marc-Antoine Barbier first emerged from late-night home studio improvisations triangulating Hassel, Krause, and sleep deprivation. Gradually, granular tapestries took shape, weaving modal electronics with percussion, sax, flute, and DX7. The result is a low-lit patchwork of dream and delirium, fractal ambient and fifth-world freefall: Musée Des Espèces [‘Museum of Species’].
Barbier’s background in new wave world-building and synth-patch sculpting fuses here to full effect. The songs are alternately soothing and serpentine, swaying with smoke, rhythm, color, and ceremony. It’s album-as-environment, a harmony of spheres and vertical terrain, swiftly tilting through a tunnel of sky, sea, and circuitry.
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1: I often go back to listen to my own music. I don’t think it’s egocentric; I feel like the pieces become entities, discoveries—like a collection of rocks if that’s something you’re into. Honestly, most of the time I have no memories of how I created the piece I’m listening to, which I find fascinating.
2: I hate cantaloupe and never buy it, but I try it every chance I get. I must admit, it’s starting to grow on me. I think it’s good to acquire a taste for new things.
3: Dogs are man’s best friend—at least mine are.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
I’ve been deeply inspired by Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. I find his theorization of sounds in nature fascinating—the balance between geophony (earth sounds), biophony (animal sounds), and anthropophony (human sounds). I’m not a bioacoustician, but Krause’s descriptions of how animals communicate and adapt across different bandwidths influenced my album Musée des espèces a lot. It made me think more vertically, similar to how Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts helped me see music as a landscape or sculpture.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I started playing guitar when I was 10, but as a teenager, I became more interested in composing and recording rather than learning songs. I discovered John Frusciante’s solo work, which exposed me to instrumental DIY experimentation. Around that time, I began looping my voice and guitar through a cheap loop pedal, trying things that I wasn’t sure could even be called music yet, but it felt meaningful. Over time, my processes became more sophisticated, but I try to stay close to that initial feeling of heuristic exploration.
3. What are five of your favorite albums of all time? (Yes, I know it’s difficult.)
Mariah – Utakata no Hibi
Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise
Talking Heads – Speaking in Tongues
Tears for Fears – Songs from the Big Chair
Kōji Kondō – Zelda Ocarina of Time
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
My first visit to Berlin was around 2011, after I turned 18. My brother’s friend Florian took us to a DJ set outdoors. There were many people, and it sounded amazing. The music was minimal, and everyone went crazy for the smallest hi-hat drop. Coming from North America, where electronic music was more EDM-focused, I was in awe of how responsive the crowd was. It was pure love for sounds and vibrations. That’s when I knew I loved Berlin.
5. What’s your favorite place in your town?
Mont-Royal is a fantastic park. I don’t go there often, but every time I reach the top and see Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), I feel truly happy to live here. I mostly visit in winter with friends. We have a secret spot where we can light a small fire in our snow suits and drink spiked coffee.
6. If there were no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I might make sandwiches or pizza and run a small restaurant—although it would have a terrible vibe without music. I love working with dough. Or I could be a bioacoustician, doing field recordings of bird songs—would that be cheating?
7. What was the last record or piece of music you bought or listened to?
I’ve been really into the new compilation Telepathic Fish: Trawling the Early 90s Ambient Underground. It’s a really fun album.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Yasuaki Shimizu.
9. What was your best gig (as a performer or spectator)?
In 2022, we performed at MUTEK Montreal with my band Totalement Sublime at the SAT. It was part of an improvisation series we did to compose a new album in front of an audience. We used various machines, guitar, bass, and my saxophone. It was a special, scary, and formative experience—blindly trusting our instincts. It’s a skill I’ve developed and try to incorporate as much as possible into my musical practice.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
It’s very important to me. I love experimenting with machines. Sometimes, you think you’re headed in one direction, and then accidental sounds happen and you feel like an alchemist. It’s humbling to let go and listen instead of controlling everything.
The album began as night sessions during the pandemic. I don’t usually compose at night, but these were strange times. I sat in front of my modular synthesizer and my DX7, feeding my granular sampler with FM sweeps and some percussion. I played around with the equipment and jammed simultaneously with my DX7. That became the foundation for most of the tracks. I soon sensed a common thread between the sessions—they evoked nature, which I longed for while being stuck in my small apartment due to the lockdown. I then built upon these improvisations, which eventually became an EP. Later, I sent the music to Britt Brown from Not Not Fun, who liked it and asked if I’d be interested in making a full album. So I went back in creation, trying to use similar tools but it was after COVID and my mindset was different. The resulting songs were more rhythmic and luminous. This created a dynamic of day and night opposition within the album’s pacing. It reminded me of Krause’s description of dusk and dawn as two dense sonic events in the animal orchestra. Conceptually, Musée des espèces (Museum of Species) became a documentation of a fictional biophony.
