Chantal Dumas | Victoriaville Sound Matter (2007)

Victoriaville Sound Matter | From 5min.45sec.
(MP3, 16MB)

To notice here: the integration of “concrete” recordings like hockey game to a large variety of electronic sounds.

Victoriaville Sound Matter was commissioned by the Festival de Musique de Victoriaville (Québec). Each piece parts of the program has been composed from sound takes done in the city of Victoriaville.

Typically, recorded sound is considered as a representation of reality. Unbekownst to the average person -but also to a vast majority of sound professionals and composers- a sound recording can also be considered as an entity by itself. Or, to be more precise, an “objet sonore”, as Pierre Schaeffer aptly described it more than half a century ago. This is what makes “Victoriaville Matière Sonore” a project about Victoriaville in the most significant sense of the term. Not as a poor and biased representation of the place but instead as a creative exploration of a sonic substance that came originally from this town and was then freely employed to create the sound pieces on this CD.

In addition to this, what I proposed to the participant artists is to set up a form of collective creation that precisely address the phenomenological features of this sonic substance, as well as those of each creative mind or spirit involved. We established a sequence of transformation of the original field recordings from Victoriaville (sequence of the tracks on this CD), in which each one of us worked only with the finished piece of the precedent artist. This is thus as much about Victoriaville as about the participants themselves -which, in the end, cannot be otherwise, no matter what extractions from reality we take, and regardless on how we take them.

To my surprise, some people insist on calling this a “remix”. In the context of popular music (where the term originally came from) this makes sense. But within so-called “experimental” music, with the degree of transformation of sonic matter and the aesthetic extent of it that is tacitly allowed, this is a completely misleading term. As I see it, each one of the pieces created for this CD is a composition in its own right, and is the result of an extensive process of mutation, transformation, development and reconfiguration. Calling this a “remix” is like calling a piece of bread a “remix” of wheat.

While millions of people today constantly gather fixed extractions of reality (in the form of photographs or video or sounds) with the specific purpose of somehow perceiving that reality again through an illusion (no mater how beautifl or emotive), some of us work with the realization that those extractions, in fact, are a different “reality” in itself.

Francisco López.