Art has long been a tool for responding to injustice. Like how Impressionism created tides during the Industrial revolution, postmodernism has turbo-charged liberalism in a power system desperately tightening the reins, art in all forms is capable of engineering social change and starting a discussion on often vague constructs, helping us reframe, rethink, and recontextualize crises to better tackle them. One group doing this is Réverbérations d'une crise, a collective of artists in Montreal working at the intersection of music and sound art, but with a singular raison d'être, to auditorily investigate Montreal's housing crisis. Their recent compilation, "Une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal (A sound inquiry on housing in Montreal)", features ten pieces from contributors of varying artistic sensibilities, practices, and histories, with Aidan Girt of God Speed! You Black Emperor featuring alongside up-and-coming sound artists like Amanda Harvey. The collection came about through a series of "listening sessions, recordings, reflections, discussions and exercises over several months." At its core, it is a sonic portrait of a community processing its increasingly inhospitable environment.
The reasons for the current cost of living crisis felt globally are heavily compounded. However, some issues are less opaque than others. Montreal has less affordable housing and more houselessness than the Canadian average. Lopsided economic policies disproportionately affect marginalized communities resulting in tangible outcomes. Federal changes in the 80s and 90s saw responsibility for social programs placed on ill-equipped municipalities. This localized pressure mounted when the federal government began subsidizing homeownership, which only benefits people who already own homes. Low-Income home ownership has been in decline ever since. The problems are big and small, from artists with little to no time or resources to work to minority families losing their homes. In 2023, in a country whose policies are often held up as an example of successful socialization, it's difficult not to see the twisted irony and ethical misdeeds; demographics being stripped of the opportunity to fulfill a basic physiological need on Maslow's hierarchy. This frustration is heard and felt in "Une enquête sonore sur le logement à Montréal", an enlightening and absorbing compilation that mixes the comically absurd with the deathly serious.
From the condensed and sound-as-theatre collage of Claude Périard on the opening track "Les lieux disparus" to the sputtered and tense strings of "Homage to Martin Peach" from Christine White, Hubert Gendron-Blais & Philippe Battikha, which closes the collection with deftly focused and perpetually taut static pulses and ASMR flickers, this compilation is compelling . Philippe Battikha contributes two solo tracks to the compilation, the compelling fuzzy post-rock of "Q-Block" and the romantically sad yearnings of "Reflections on a New Question", played on an indiscernible wind instrument that sounds much like a plastic tuba. While esoteric post-rock and expansive field recordings do a lot of the heavy lifting sonically, there are ample spoken word samples providing exposition throughout, like on the bouncy "Housing and care for all (Down with real estate capital vultures)" by Aidan Girt and Stefan Christoff which feature Mostafa Henaway by way of a sampled monologue. Henaway is a long-time community organizer at the Immigrant Worker Centre in Montreal, and this buoyant track is an educational listen about how migrant workers were affected by the Garment District outsourcing production to the very countries the migrant workers had immigrated from. Equally verbose, Christine White's "The Price of Precarity" recounts a hilarious encounter with a finicky property manager who struggles to prove a bike can fit through the door without scuffing up the paint. She names her home's shortcomings like badges of dishonor, ignorable leaks, mold, mice, broken stairs and fridges, the types of inconveniences that aren't worth dealing with property managers over but that bubbe up and diminish the quality of life over time. White mixes candid soundbites in French and English while zooming in on the rhythmic capabilities of construction work and the cathartic potentiality of drone music.
The curiously discordant and bending notes of Hubert Gendron-Blais' guitar on "À la multiplicité fragile d'une ruelle de Parc-Ex" are interpolated with the sounds of a neighborhood moving; kids playing, metal gates swinging, various clatters, birdsong. Jordan Torres Bussière's intensely absorbing spoken word takes luscious turns to ambient electro-pop and then to industrial soundscapes on "Une communauté dynamique de gens qui vous ressemblent". Though the effectiveness of this French language track is reserved for native-level speakers, there's an allure to the radio drama elements; the motorbikes, cars, cityscapes, and rising sirens, all culminating in a compelling listen for people of any tongue. For those with an intermediate level of French, you can just about make out the story; a man narrates his account of the social transformations of southwestern Montreal at the beginning
of the 21st century. Amanda Harvey's "How We Negociate Worlds" is the restful core of the compilation. It stretches with mournfully low tones, tense but strangely peaceful reverberations, and what are ostensibly cicadas. It is a decidedly nighttime piece - long and abysmal, and like the compilation, it inspires much contemplation and reflection. Like "Les aléas disgracieux du pouvoir/Predicaments of Power" by speranza spir, where a beautiful distant piano plays over slurping sounds and odd rhythms that carry sincere and apocalyptically stern messages.
The situation on the ground warrants the Kafkaesque mood across this lofty compilation. Yet, in the end, we are left with the question; will this effort really make a change? Its esoteric flare and dry artistic brilliance mean it will alienate many of the people who would most benefit from listening; property developers, government officials, and, backward-classist as it may be, the rich; people too often concerned with the smaller picture. While the nobility of Réverbérations d'une crise coming together under the banner of social justice has created an epic and worthy listen, the compilation could be mistaken for a sounding board for a community struggling to make sense of their nonsensical environment. That may be enough. If this exercise was a salve for the artists, then for the rest of us, most of whom are facing similar struggles, it offers a strong spirit of community around the typically isolating experience of housing insecurity. "Réverbérations d'une crise" is a profoundly affecting monument to art as catharsis and an absorbing take on documentary-meets-sound-art-meets-music.
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