Gilles Gobeil

Les Lointains gathers six works by Gilles Gobeil composed between 2008 and 2013, many during residencies and commissions abroad, all remixed by the composer in 2015. Gobeil works in the vein of the “cinema for the ear”, and most of these pieces start from a book, a myth or a person. The disc was a finalist for album of the year at the Prix Opus 2014-15.

Les lointains noirs et rouges, commissioned by and dedicated to Folkmar Hein, uses recordings made in his Berlin apartment: grandfather clock, coffee machine, shawm, zither, birds from the balcony and the bells of the Rathaus Schöneberg, pushed towards imaginary worlds of blacks and reds. Castalie (2008), a DAAD commission freely inspired by Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, marks the 60th birthday of musique concrète with concrete sources and little or no processing; it was made in 32 tracks for Wave Field Synthesis, the GRM Acousmonium and a mini-dome. Bol-Hydre draws mostly on the Bol, an instrument invented by Jean-François Laporte, grafted onto the myth of the Hydra.

Sibylle (2010) reads Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas questioning the Cumaean Sibyl, voiced by the butoh choreographer Camille Mutel. Golem, after Gustav Meyrink's novel, was written for Rick Sacks to play on a malletKAT controlling a sampler and is heard here in a version without performer. Des temps oubliés, made at the GRM in 2012 for the Liszt bicentenary, features François Couture on piano.

Born in Sorel-Tracy, Québec, 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, and his Trilogie d'ondes won the Prix Opus 2004-05.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 15134, 2015.