Christian Bouchard

Broken Ground is a single 58-minute work by Christian Bouchard, composed in 2011-12 in his Montréal studio as the soundtrack for the exhibition of the same name by the artist Derek Besant, who commissioned it. Besant’s exhibition looks at seven cities over ten years and at how redevelopment and street-level construction change the way cityscapes are perceived, treating the building sites like stage sets with debris, shadows and random figures.

The music runs in twelve sections whose titles come from the vocabulary of materials and their failure, from Linear Elasticity and Intergranular Attack to Low Cycle Fatigue, Recycling and Condensed State of Matter. In the booklet, Besant writes that the meeting of his images with Bouchard’s electronic soundtrack turns the installation into a picture of the constant change cities go through, and of the traces earlier structures leave behind.

The piece premiered at Phoenix Brighton in 2012, and a revised version was heard at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in 2013. The exhibition then travelled to Venice, Kraków, Oldenburg, Newcastle, the Douro printmaking biennial, Beijing, Madrid and Tokyo. The version on this disc was remixed in 2016.

Born in Quebec City in 1968, Bouchard studied with Yves Daoust at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, earning a first prize in electroacoustic composition in 2000. His music combines soundscape, experimental electronica, glitch and acousmatic art. He is a founding member of the live quartet Theresa Transistor with Christian Calon, Mario Gauthier and Monique Jean, works as a location sound recordist for film, and received the Joseph S Stauffer Prize in 2017.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 17141, 2017.