Meet the Montreal composer doing his part to protect nature's pollinators

"Insects embody contradictions," muses Leon Louder, a producer/composer/sound artist based in Montreal, during a recent conversation with CBC Music. "Underneath every beautiful flower, there's this slimy, grotesque miniature world that we don't talk about."

One place they do actually talk about insects is Montreal's Insectarium, and when organizers there approached Louder in 2023 to create a soundtrack that celebrates pollinating insects, he decided to express that paradox through music.

"When you walk into the Insectarium, you've got this dome of butterflies," he describes. "It's staggeringly beautiful. You could be in a cathedral or looking at stained glass. But then, if you get up close to a moth at night, it's like, most people are grossed out."

These tiny creatures are often misunderstood, so Louder asked himself, "If insect song was a language, what could it be telling us?"

He points out that 41 per cent of insect species have seen steep declines in the past decade. "So, naturally, I wondered how I could inspire my audience to want to protect them."

From that cocoon of an idea emerged Entomophonia, a collection of 11 tracks of electronic music derived entirely from audio samples of insect sounds.

The audio samples Louder used were obtained from strategically placed contact mics at the Insectarium, which captured "tiny eating, chewing and walking sounds of mantises," he explains. Louder also gathered his own: "Every time I was in the country, I just recorded everything in whatever way I could."

Then, he set about transforming those samples into sound art.

"The first thing I did was take these sounds and magnify them," he explains. "As soon as I started messing with insect song, I immediately got this experience of very eerie sounds. And that's cool, because we actually have this fear of insects that's just as natural to us as the revulsion."

'Cicada and moth wings [and] a lot of percussion'

But there's also a mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty to the sound world Louder creates with Entomophonia.

"I began to wonder if the key to protecting insects might be to make us feel connected to them, to see ourselves reflected in them," he says. "And communal music-listening experiences are one of the most fundamental ways to establish this kind of connection and empathy."

Louder first performed Entomophonia at the outdoor stage of Montreal's Mutek festival in August 2023. "People were drinking and talking," he remembers thinking. "There's going to have to be some substance to the sounds, otherwise, no one is going to listen and it's just going to be awkward. So, I got up there and I looked at the crowd and went, 'Well, I'm going to start with one of the more banging numbers, which is like, cicada and moth wings [and] a lot of percussion.' Jolt people into noticing that the show is starting and then I'll take it to some subtler stuff."

In May, at Toronto's Music Gallery, attendees heard an installation version of Entomophonia — a 12-minute audio loop, experienced with the help of vibro-tactile devices.

On July 26, Louder will perform an extended ambient version of the project at the Montreal Insectarium's Celebrating Pollinators event. "I'm creating a sort of environmental version of the album, so people can come and go [and] inhabit the piece."

He'll also take Entomophonia on a tour of Greater Montreal between September 2024 and May 2025, under the aegis of Montreal's Conseil des arts.

"Art is a powerful lens for looking at nature and for looking at issues," Louder says.

"It's good that we become aware of [insects], that we become sensitive to them. Seeing somebody step aggressively on a beetle, it's like, what's a beetle ever done to anybody? Spiders are good to have around. A lot of flies are actually good to have around. They're the tiniest things, and the more we cultivate that, the more we're likely to be sensitive to other creatures — and each other."