Montreal Sound Matter / Montréal
matières sonore
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
Review
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