Works by Francisco López / Louis Dufort / Steve Heimbecker / Hélène Prévost / Mathieu Lévesque / a_dontigny / Chantal Dumas / Tomas Phillips

Montreal Sound Matter / Montréal matières sonore brings together eight Canadian and international sound artists. The project began with a workshop on environmental sound collecting by Francisco López and led to the development of a collective sound project including an album, a sound installation, and a concert. This is the recording.

The artists create an immersive sound installation made up of fragments of Montreal, which propose a reflection and a questioning on the city. Far from being a postcard, these sound portraits suggest an abstract view of Montreal made up of fragments modeled or transformed to the liking of the artists. Through these places turned non-places and thus more or less unrecognizable, the pieces present an interesting variety of aesthetics, constructions and creative processes. - Esther Bourdages

Yet it is not about the city as a conglomerate of soundmarks or stereotyped symbolic elements--it does not aim at making a sound portrait or a representational creation. My proposal to all the participating artists involved in the project was to foresee the city --both outdoors and indoors, both the public and the private spaces-- as a constantly-changing generator of sound matter. The original source environmental recordings were carried out by the participating artists in Montreal during April 2006, and we all shared the common pool of sound matter thus generated to create the individual pieces. I believe this is an interesting way of setting up a challenging situation in which we are dealing with a limited and intentionally restricted universe of sonic extractions of reality, and also -and more importantly-a straightforward way of proceeding to reveal the creative individual substance of each one of us. - Francisco López

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