Dehors La Nuit Est Gouvernée
Aug 14, 2020, 08:34 AM
Montreal lockdown sound reimagined by Jon Nicholls.
"I was assigned a recording from Montreal – ‘La Nuit Gouvernée’, which is a somewhat mysterious piece of audio. It’s not clear what’s happening or what the precise location might be; it has a slightly threatening, industrial feeling, with sustained machine-like drones punctuated by a-rhythmic metal percussive sounds.
"Rather than attempt to decipher the ambiguous context, I instead became interested in the two main musical elements: the background texture and the intermittent percussive sounds. I isolated both of these and began to process the material using a variety of filtering, shuffling and granular synthesis techniques.
"As I began to work with the material in a more structural way, I found myself returning to my initial responses to the source material: a feeling of pervasive threat, the sense of a disrupted world, a fragile balance perpetually thrown off-kilter."
The slightly adapted title refers to a poetry collection by René Char, whose work explores similar territory.
"I was assigned a recording from Montreal – ‘La Nuit Gouvernée’, which is a somewhat mysterious piece of audio. It’s not clear what’s happening or what the precise location might be; it has a slightly threatening, industrial feeling, with sustained machine-like drones punctuated by a-rhythmic metal percussive sounds.
"Rather than attempt to decipher the ambiguous context, I instead became interested in the two main musical elements: the background texture and the intermittent percussive sounds. I isolated both of these and began to process the material using a variety of filtering, shuffling and granular synthesis techniques.
"As I began to work with the material in a more structural way, I found myself returning to my initial responses to the source material: a feeling of pervasive threat, the sense of a disrupted world, a fragile balance perpetually thrown off-kilter."
The slightly adapted title refers to a poetry collection by René Char, whose work explores similar territory.
Part of the #StayHomeSounds project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of the global coronavirus lockdown around the world - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds