Not a name I’d heard of before, though like France, the French Canadian sector does tend to proliferate radical new-music composers! Almost as though he’s combining the talents of François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani and Michel Redolfi, Gobeil makes electroacoustic music that is really vivid, dynamic and almost 3-D, and he’s capable in many different mediums: the purely sonic/electronic, the esoteric using rich synthetic tones (actually an Ondes Martenot on Voix blanche), the dramatic (especially when aided by Rene Lussier’s guitar work on Associations libres) and even the “cinema for your ears” genre with the theatrical 15 minute La Ville Machine. The tracks that follow tend to combine the elements I’ve described above, and it gets all the more avant-garde, especially so on the closing track Traces. A devastatingly radical and fascinating album!
