Gilles Gobeil

Trois Songes brings together three works by Gilles Gobeil, all conceived for 5.1 channels and all realized at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, where he spent four residencies, almost eleven months in total, between January 2005 and August 2007. Gobeil calls them program music: each rests on a literary argument, each borrows freely from music of the past, and all three contain sounds generated by René Lussier on his daxophone.

Ombres, espaces, silences… (2005), commissioned by the ZKM, comes from Jacques Lacarrière’s book Men Possessed by God, read almost thirty years earlier, on the first Christian monks. Modified fragments of Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova polyphony are set within a wider world of noises evoking the hermits of the desert, its aridity and threat, and their spiritual imagination; it received an honorable mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2005. Entre les deux rives du printemps (2006) sets Gobeil’s impressions of Paradise, the third part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, a poem of speed, energy and light. Le miroir triste (2007) is cinema for the ear after Hoffmanniana, an unshot 1975 scenario by Andrey Tarkovsky on the tormented life of E T A Hoffmann, evoking a few of its scenes, among them a dialogue on dreams and mirrors with Donna Anna. The album was a finalist for the Prix Opus 2007-08.

Born in Sorel-Tracy, Québec, in 1954, Gobeil studied composition with Serge Garant at the Université de Montréal and was introduced to electroacoustic music by Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont. Many of his works are inspired by literature or film and try to make them visible through sound.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0892, 2008.