Projet Archipel at RIDM

Projet Archipel, the first sound documentary

at RIDM. Usually associated with cinema, the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal showed boldness this year by programming, for the very first time, a work from acousmatic art. An urban

symphony. Acousmatic music

is a distant branch of digital arts. To create it, composers manipulate not scores and notes, but sounds. Walking along Montréal’s shorelines, composers Guillaume Côté and Guillaume Campion recorded different sounds, transformed them by computer, musicalized them and then mixed them with interviews about Montréal’s riverbanks. Artists, politicians, fishers, urban planners and visionaries are thus brought together in a highly poetic work, a kind of urban symphony halfway between documentary and music: Projet Archipel. The Guillaume C duo. Side by side, Guillaume

Côté and Guillaume Campion make

one smile. Côté is short, with cropped hair and tattooed arms. Campion, by contrast, is tall and looks more like a metal-music fan with very long hair. Both recently completed master’s degrees in sound creation at Université de Montréal and presented their first musical collaboration on the evening of November 18. In the dimness of the Norman-McLaren room at the Cinémathèque québécoise, the two Guillaumes deployed fragments of interviews, water sounds and dreamlike textures across an orchestra of loudspeakers. In this sound documentary, listeners were immersed for half an hour in a soundscape: the shores of Montréal. When music becomes engaged. This considerable research-creation work is accompanied by a website providing information on

access to water and

the St. Lawrence River in the Montréal archipelago. In addition to the seven themes developed in the sound documentary, the site offers 25 information capsules totaling 90 minutes of additional content. The composers are not merely taking on the role of documentarians; they also take an engaged position by focusing on access to water and the river, an issue at the heart of current municipal discussions. Projet Archipel takes its title from a broad development program for the various bodies of water in the Montréal region. In addition to raising awareness of the issue, the Guillaume C. sound documentary invites reflection. At the very end of the piece, one interviewee asks: although Montréal lies within an archipelago of islands, why do Montréalers never identify themselves as island dwellers? In short, Projet Archipel is an entirely original way to inform listeners and lead them to reflect on their identity. The work will be presented again at Espace Cercle-Carré in April 2017. Stay tuned. Projet Archipel website. For full details, consult the related page, event page, exhibition

page and partner links

provided here.