Yvan Sheremetieff

Yvan Sheremetieff is a Toronto-based composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist whose body of work includes both solo output and collaborations with the rock bands The Boudoirs and Bobby Heaven. His formal training is in medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He has studied composition with renowned Canadian composer Kevin Lau. 

Yvan's solo material defies genre, focusing on expressing thought form and proposing alternative recording and compositional techniques. Drawing from his clinical experiences, Yvan began to explore tangential thinking and psychotic confusion on INTRODUCTION TO TANGENTIALITY (2016). He integrated tangentiality with improvisation and field recording on VOICE MEMOS (2020). The sprawling three-part album meditates on nature, authenticity, unconscious motives, metacognition, and new possibilities in art. VOICE MEMOS PT. 3 was created together with OpenAI Jukebox, a music-generating neural network. 

Yvan's upcoming work, THE INTERPRETATION OF VOICES, is a six-episode audio serial that tells the story of its own birth through music, dialogue, and environmental sound. Emphasizing naturalistic capture and improvisation, the piece shows its sketchy, raw insides in the form of augmented voice memos, sound collage, and a psychoanalytic mode of self-inquiry. Musical numbers regress to childlike play, fantasies contend with reality, and the noise of the outside world passes through the mind of a psychiatrist seeking to court his own psychotic core. Sounds of hospital rooms, fox dens, public demonstrations, reverberating oil tanks, and AI-powered neural networks form a complex sonic palette that is both uncomfortably intimate and hypnotically vast. This work of process art exists (or struggles to exist) in the overlap of concept album, podcast, self-portrait, city novel, and multispecies ethnography.