Gilles Gobeil

… dans le Silence de la Nuit… brings together four acousmatic works by Gilles Gobeil, composed in his Montréal studio between 1995 and 2001. Gobeil works in what is called “cinéma pour l’oreille”, cinema for the ear: many of his pieces start from a book or a film and try to make it visible through sound alone. Three of the four works here are free adaptations of literary texts.

Projet Proust is a personal reading of the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann, commissioned by Radio-Canada and first broadcast in 1995; the final version, with narration by actor Marc Béland, was remixed in 2000-01 and received a mention at Métamorphoses 2000. Point de passage, commissioned by ACREQ, freely adapts H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and won the Public Prize at CIMESP in São Paulo in 1999. Nuit cendre draws on the underworlds of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre; co-commissioned by Codes d’accès and Musiques & Recherches, it won the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award and both the First and Public prizes at CIMESP in 1997.

Derrière la porte la plus éloignée…, written for guitarist Arturo Parra and dedicated to Oscar and Janine Wiggli, comes from a trip to Italy: the Etruscan well in Perugia, a vaporetto in Venice, a guided visit to the cathedral of Torcello, children’s cries under the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. It received a mention at Bourges in 1999.

Born in Sorel-Tracy in 1954, Gobeil studied composition with Serge Garant at the Université de Montréal, where Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont introduced him to electroacoustics. He taught music technology at the Cégep de Drummondville from 1991 to 2017.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0155, 2001.