Rosemont/Chabanel : soundtrack for an industrial badlands

During 1999 and 2000, I lived in a district of Montreal known for its textile factories. Vast, Borg-cube shaped monstrosities line the streets. Freight trains shudder past daily, the tracks littered with fabric offcuts and used plastic sheeting. At all hours of the day and night the factory machines whirr, filling the streets below with their chatter and the smells of solvent and dye. On freezing winter mornings, I would watch the workers arrive in their buses from the suburbs. North-Indian, Korean, Guatemalan, Croatian; the all-purpose undifferentiated mass of immigrant labour upon which modern economies prosper. The Rosemont and Chabanel districts are badlands, the industrial unconscious of modern trade. Rosemont / Chabanel is an attempt to render this environment as a sonic experience. Although electroacoustic sounds have been used, none of the sounds originate from the actual environment. The sonic environment is a constructed one, intensely processed, technologically mediated.