Re:

Re: was the sound project of Aden Evens and Ian Ilavsky, who first met in the Philosophy department at McGill University in 1990 and began working on music together in 1996. They gathered source material in a variety of ways: controlled site recordings, random field recordings, instrumental improvisations, live and programmed beats, and lots of filter bank knob-twiddling. Their two records for Constellation used the computer as compositional tool, serving to recover and re-assemble disparate elements into semi-coherent sonic narratives.

Aden graduated from Harvard with a degree in Philosophy and Math, spent a few years programming computers in Boston, then moved to Montreal in 1989 and wrote his PhD on Deleuze, Heidegger and Neitzsche at McGill. He taught various courses in Philosophy, Literature and Sound Theory at SUNY Albany, the New School in NYC, McGill and Harvard during the late-90’s before landing a professorship at MIT. His first book, Sound Ideas, was published in the ‘Theory Out of Bounds’ series by Minnesota Press. His academic and published work focuses on questions of digital and analogue sound, the ontology of noise, and the cultural implications of digital media. He has since taken up a post at Dartmouth and lives in Hanover NH with his wife, two kids, and big dog.

Ian Ilavsky left school to bake bagels and play in post-punk band Sofa in 1992, joined folk-punk group Sackville in 1996 and co-founded Constellation Records in 1997. He curated and produced the Musique Fragile concert series from 1997-1999, which featured some of the first performances by emerging experimental musicians from Montreal and the surrounding region. He has contributed to recordings by various Montreal bands, both as engineer (Fly Pan Am) and musician (Hangedup, Frankie Sparo). He was a member of Silver Mt. Zion from 2001 through 2008, and co-founded the very loud drum and bass duo Diebold in 2003.