Chris Goudreau: Working With What Will Not Settle

I have spent a long time making work out of sounds that do not fully explain themselves.

A sound starts to feel familiar, then changes. A loop begins to settle in, then breaks apart. A voice comes through, but not clearly enough to give you the whole story. I am interested in that point where you are trying to understand what you are hearing, but the sound keeps moving before you can pin it down.

That uncertainty is not something I try to remove from the work. It is what I use to move the listener.

My work has taken different forms over the years. I began with SICKNESS, later developed OMEI, and eventually started releasing work under my own name. They are different projects, but they come from the same place. Each one deals with attention, memory, behavior, repetition, and the unstable ways people make sense of themselves and the world around them.

SICKNESS was the most immediate version of that idea.

SICKNESS is a thousand thoughts in one second.

The work is fast, dense, cut up, and full of sudden changes. It uses harsh noise, altered samples, loops, editing, and stereo movement to keep the listener from getting too comfortable. A sound may appear just long enough for you to think you understand it, then it changes direction. A loop may create a pattern, then be interrupted before it turns into something safe or predictable.

I never saw SICKNESS as simply making something loud or aggressive. I wanted it to be detailed. I wanted people to have to listen. The editing was part of the music, not something added afterward to make it more complicated. The goal was to make the listener feel like they were being moved through the piece instead of standing outside it.

A lot of the subject matter in SICKNESS comes from illness, memory, fear, violence, and the ways people change when something difficult enters their lives. Disease was never just a horror image for me. It was a way of thinking about the things that affect us and stay with us. Sometimes they change how we behave. Sometimes they change how we remember. Sometimes they become so tied to us that it is hard to tell where the person ends and the damage begins.

OMEI came from the other side of that same feeling.

OMEI is one thought for a thousand years.

Where SICKNESS moves quickly, OMEI slows down. It works with repetition, long duration, and sounds that stay around long enough for you to notice the small ways they change. A loop can become comforting, irritating, hypnotic, claustrophobic, or strangely emotional depending on how long you remain with it.

OMEI is about staying with something instead of escaping it. It is about what happens when one sound, one idea, or one feeling keeps returning. At first it may seem simple. Over time, it starts to open up, wear down, or become something else.

SICKNESS and OMEI are different ways of dealing with uncertainty. SICKNESS creates it through speed and interruption. OMEI creates it through time and repetition.

The work I release under my own name brings those ideas into a more personal and material space.

In releases such as Ultranegative, Odd Monsters, Brief Sensuality, and Further Fields, Or Close, I have moved more toward tape, musique concrète, found sound, altered recordings, and the traces people leave behind. I am interested in sounds that feel like evidence: a voice, a room, a gesture, a mistake, a damaged recording, something overheard but not fully understood.

Tape is important to me because it holds onto things while changing them. It can preserve a moment, but it does not preserve it perfectly. Time, repetition, damage, and manipulation all become part of the memory. A recording can make you feel close to something while still keeping it out of reach.

This work is still about people. It is about the stories we tell about ourselves, the difference between what we show and what we keep private, and the small moments where something slips through. I am interested in the parts of people that do not fit neatly into the version of themselves they present to the world.

SICKNESS turns uncertainty into speed.

OMEI turns uncertainty into duration.

The work under Chris Goudreau turns uncertainty into fragments, evidence, and human behavior.

All of it comes from the same need: to make sound that does not simply sit in the background, but asks people to pay attention to what is changing, what is missing, and what they may not be able to fully explain.