An all-encompassing bath of sound. A wave of sound that caresses our minds: immersed in the sound habitat, one of Montreal’s only spatialized listening rooms, at the Centre PHI.
It was a sunny Thursday afternoon, between my morning and late afternoon classes, in the middle of the week. Like everyone else, it’s the frenzy of everyday life: school, work, meetings, subway. The usual movements are at the heart of the city’s hustle and bustle. We rarely think about the hustle and bustle of the city, with all our senses constantly in focus. Then, one day, we make the choice: unconsciously or consciously. We stop. And today, this interruption of the mundane took place at the Centre PHI.
There, I discovered one of their new interactive experiences: Habitat Sonore.
In this intimate listening room, where our bodies rest on ball cushions in near-darkness, we are projected into a new universe. Everyday life is transmuted into a reality composed entirely of music. No telephone, no conversation, no lights, no movement, no outside distractions whatsoever.
All that remained were the musical compositions and the few colored, subdued glimmers of neon. It was the first time I’d experienced being immersed in such a listening room. With this “orchestra” of 16 loudspeakers scattered around the room, the music seemed to come from nowhere. And from everywhere at once. It was a little inside me, and a little outside me, too. A true mastery of sound spatialization.
Of course, this active listening offered by the Centre PHI would not have been possible without the work of various artists, who for several months had the opportunity to rework some of their musical productions. Totally sublime, Moe Clarke and Pursuit Grooves were also able to master spatialized music production, creating their own auditory decors.
After a few minutes’ wait, with only three people around me (a rather intimate setting), program 2 kicks off. Totalement Sublime, with songs from the Albédo album, opens the dance. The performance is surely the longest of the three, and the most progressive. It gets off to a gentle start, with sparse synthesizer sounds and little analog glitches. I recognize their “760KM” music, but it stretches out much longer than I remember.
This is a light-hearted opening that anchors us in our cushions, yet it is soon shattered by the brittle sound of guitar strings. The composition follows a linear, if sometimes chaotic, trajectory, with the various noises and notes moving back and forth across the room.
If Totalement Sublime offered us a glitchy journey into sonic matter, Moe Clark, for her part, takes us into the depths of the Canadian mountains and aboriginal myths. Between her use of soundscapes (trees in the wind, the current of a river, leaves and branches crackling under the weight of an animal’s footsteps…), and her “spoken words” – her poetry – we take flight to the rhythm of the beating of a hummingbird’s wings, water drums, horn and gourd rattles and throat singing. Her voice, which sings in creative form, is piercing in piyêsiwak ahkohtowin, and Montreal suddenly seems far away.
The program closes with a final composition by Ontario-based artist-producer Pursuit Grooves. She offers us an experimental composition, somewhere between downtempo and abstract, to bring us down gently from this hour-long sonic journey.
