Les Escales Sonores in the Gardens of the Montreal Insectarium

A Musical Stopover offers a tour through the gardens of the Insectarium: four sound installations created for the gardens that bring to light their uniqueness. The design of the installations, specially conceived to dissolve into nature, offers a completely immersion in these sonic alcoves. This French-Québécois coproduction brings together four composers, Québécois composers Alexandre Bellavance and Christian Calon with the participation of the visual artist Phil Allard, and French composers Hervé Birolini and Philippe Le Goff.

A Musical Stopover proposes a sensory experience in four plant and sonic spaces that offers a new look at the environment in which it lives. These are intimate places for one or two people at a time, symbolic bubbles that provide an escape from the busy-ness of the world.

Les Escales Improbables present A Musical Stopover in 2014 for the third time, after the first edition in 2006 and the second in 2010.

3 fenêtres (3 Windows)
Alexis Bellavance
Three reflective islands, creating the impression that the water, for a moment, is frozen in these places. Mirrors opening toward the sky that allow it to settle in more clearly on the pond’s surface. Moving slowly to the rhythm of the sounds that emerge from them, responding subtly to each other.

In Grid
Hervé Birolini
Through a web of speakers, the listener wanders around. Around him and according to where he is listening from the speakers in view reconstitute the landscape like an image made of sonic pixels. In a form at times abstract, at times concrete, moving in an acoustical field, he is confronted with perceptions of animality, of nature or even of indefiniteness—a listening moment ceaselessly renewing itself . . .

La botte à nique
Christian Calon
A tribute to art brut
Among the herbs, bushes, under leaves and behind stones the joyful proliferation of micro phenomena of the plant world reveals its raw and unbridled speech.

Sursauts (Starts 2014)
Philippe Le Goff
I hear voices! Sursauts is a tale with neither tail nor head in which the characters have gotten lost in the forest.
The lilacs cast changing reflections, evil creatures with the sweet voice of a child call to us apparently to guide us, but the bursts of laughter reveal that actually they seek to make us more lost.
With the voices of Betty and Margaux and Ella.

Artistic Direction Sylvie Teste.
Sound effects Christian Calon et Alexis Bellavance (Québec), Philippe Le Goff et Hervé Birolini (France).
Design équipe de l’ÉSAD (École supérieure d’arts et de design de Reims, France) and Phil Allard (Montréal).
A production of Escales Improbables de Montréal in coproduction with Cesare (Centre national de création musicale de Reims) and the festival Entre cour et jardin (Between yard and garden).

The Montréal presentation is in collaboration with the Montréal Insectarium and the support of the operation FRIMAS 2014, established by the Consulat général de France à Québec and the Institut français.
Cette production sera également présentée en France dans le cadre du festival Entre cour et jardins les 29 et 30 août aux Jardins du Château de Barbirey sur Ouche et les 20 et 21 septembre aux Jardins de l’Abbaye de Trois Fontaines L’Abbaye.