Gilles Gobeil

Promenades gathers seven works by Gilles Gobeil, most of them from 2014 to 2020, all tied to one theme: the stroll. Some walks are literal, others go through films, through a composer’s reveries, or through the improvisations of the musicians who provided his raw material. Four are purely acousmatic, three involve live instruments.

Un cercle hors de l’arbre, begun at the PANaroma studio in São Paulo, is freely inspired by Chris Marker’s film La Jetée and has won prizes at Destellos, Métamorphoses and Udine. Sentinelle marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, its solo part composed from improvisations by saxophonist Yves Charuest; it won 1st prize for mixed work at Musica Nova 2020. For Sous l’écorce des pierres, Folkmar Hein gave Gobeil his own recordings, and the piece imagines the altered sense of time that sets in during his long forest walks around Berlin. Détour was written for the Montpellier trio Déviation(s) (Ludovic Nicot, Julien Guillamat and Patrice Soletti), a rare return to instrumental writing after fifteen years. Soletti also plays the guitar part of Associations libres, a 1990 piece first built on the playing of René Lussier, recorded anew in 2019. Dans l’air du soir remembers Claude Debussy a century after his death, with excerpts played on piano by François Couture, and La vie se repose uses only untouched sounds from the recordings of the Swiss sculptor and composer Oscar Wiggli, a year after his passing.

Born in Sorel-Tracy, Québec, in 1954, Gobeil studied composition with Serge Garant at the Université de Montréal and came to electroacoustic music through Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont. His work belongs to the “cinema for the ear” tradition, and his disc Trilogie d’ondes won the 2004-05 Prix Opus.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24192, 2024.