(2) The second Périphérique happened last July 19 2003 in the backyard garden of a Montreal apartment on Hôtel-de-Ville.
Guests gathered in the backyard among the rampant vineyards and plants. As the event involved an enhanced and intimate listening experience, everyone connected a personal set of headphones to one of all 30 signal outputs provided by modules spread out in the garden. From the outside, one could hear only the buzzing of headphones and the continuous roaming of ambient street sounds and wind. A stage relationship occurred with artists intervening in the space of the rear façade. Interventions that night dealt in their own way with space or place specifics.
The first intervention featured the ongoing work of Mathieu Lévesque and Maude Smith-Gagnon, mixing soundscapes and poetry. The set was a transposition of a work-in-progress, involving field recordings and written impressions the duo had gathered while spending time on a deserted island off the shores of Sept-Iles, in the Côte-Nord of Québec.
Samuel Roy-Bois' audio intervention occupied a bright-lit room facing the garden , and revealed a series of amplified micro-actions through the looking glass of a patio door --contact mics manipulations and 4-track cassette mixing, swallowing, lemon conductivity, biscuits...-- This established a certain 'voyeuristic' relationship with the spectator crowd, unveiling an intimate space of his actions through the listening headsets.
The third intervention involved on-site sound experimentations from James Schidlowsky and Alexis Bellavance. Real-time audio signal manipulation from various mic sources hidden in the garden (rooftop, drain pipes, ground elements), revealing normally inaudible sounds from the immediate environment and live incidents from the presence of spectators (coughing, vibrations). The set was initially triggered by Alexis' cardiac pulsations, and James' own short wave radio manipulations.
