Timothy Gowdy is a Canadian music producer and audio/visual artist. He sang choral music professionally with the American Boychoir in Princeton, New Jersey, before pursuing classical guitar studies and a Masters in Sound Recording at the Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Quebec. Following his graduation in 2007, Gowdy began a career as a freelance producer and sound engineer; he is credited with more than seventy album productions between 2008 and 2020, including artists such as Ada Lea, Ensemble and SUUNS. His current interests lie in the use of sound feedback to augment interactivity in sound environments, as well as the deconstruction and re-synthesis of urban sonic environments.
Gowdy released his first solo album, entitled B-Stock, in February 2018. That same year he performed In support of Actress in Montreal, and as the opening act of Devon Welsh’s North American Fall tour. His live audio/visual installations were shown in various art galleries in Berlin and at MUTEK Festival in Montreal. His second album, a limited edition cassette entitled Vitrify Kate, was released in the summer of 2018.
Pachira Aquatica followed in 2019, following which Gowdy presented his audio/visual installations in various cities in Poland and Germany, as well as the Spanish edition of MUTEK Festival in Barcelona. In addition to support slots for Byron Westbrook, Lucrecia Dalt and Aaron Dilloway in Montreal, he was 2019’s Artist-in-Residence at the Eastern Bloc Data Salon XXXIII, which yielded an installation entitled Forward Feed, as well as a duo performance with Adam Basanta.
Gowdy’s third album and his first for Constellation, Therapy With Colour, was released in May 2020. He also contributed a track and a video to the label’s Corona Borealis longform series that same year. Live performances included MUTEK Montreal in September, and Node Festival in Frankfurt in October.
In March 2021, Tim composed and performed an audio/visual piece entitled Experialism for Hellerau Europäisches Zentrum der Künste (The European Center for the Arts) in Dresden, Germany. In this ambitious work, Gowdy set 8-bit recordings of his own vocal harmonies against pointillist click tapestries, as a portrayal of the sharp juxtaposition of experience re-synthesized with itself. A live performance at MUTEK Barcelona in May 2021 was followed by Experience Imperialism, a presentation at Montreal’s Suoni Por Il Popolo music festival curated by Gowdy and featuring new works by himself, Le désert mauve and Stéphanie Castonguay. Initiated by Gowdy in 2020, Experience Imperialism explores the world’s current landscape of socio-economic organization, whereby experience is extracted, analyzed and rendered as an industrial-scale commodity.
In August 2021, in collaboration with light artist Anastasija Delidova, Gowdy produced Peribitive, a site-specific sound and light performance presented at NewNow Festival in Essen, Germany, in the decommissioned Zollverein coal mine, now a UNESCO world heritage site. Peribitive explored kinesthetic perception based on the theories of F.M. Alexander. 2021 also saw the release of Canadian filmmaker Emma Roufs’ documentary Atalaya, for which T. Gowdy did sound design. The film was presented at Festival Cinema La Rochelle in France, in June 2021.