Vienna

COMPOSITIONS:

Hop(e)

to Mattéo Mion
19'58. 4 tracks. 2021
Creation Festival Espace du son. Brussels. October 2021
Composed in the Métamorphoses d'Orphée studio of Musiques&Recherches

The initial and main decision to make this piece was taken in a sudden and lively gesture as if one were throwing a "go! Hop!" in french. However, there is nothing casual about it, the act was punctuated by copious prior cogitations. But yes, to decide: a single piece of original material, a single microphone recording, and the will to stick to it.
A wager, a challenge-desire and the joy of choice. (An element from another source, very sparingly used, came to make a tiny bend).

The compositional process took place in a continuous flow, an energy consistent with this first "hop-iniatre" disposition. I remember that I had named my first work session "Hop" – out of resignation, because it had to have a name, even before I realised that it made sense.

A sometimes bouncy, wriggling character that, if I had to give it some cultural nobility, I could call Saltarello, from Saltare (which means to jump in Italian) but also because saltarello is an ancient couple's dance music, a love game marked by challenge.

Among other things, highlighting harmonic colours in what at first had none. Adding ambiguous “colourisation” - like a light colourful veil, arificial luminosities of the rainbow, while preserving the vivid, dynamic and wilderness of the original morphological trace. Comparable to the colourisation of old black and white postcards.

And then, it occurred to me to add an "e" to this Hop as if to feminise it, evoking by parenthesis, the English "hope", a "hop-timistic" way of saying that, despite the controversies and other ideological tensions, hope, which we undoubtedly need so much in these times, now seems to me to be conjugated for a new, important part, and finally...,  into the feminine.

Thanks to Annette Vande Gorne for hosting the studio.


Si c'était du jour

Si c’était du jour. (If it were day)
16'20. 1998. 8 tracks
Commissioned by Ina-Grm.

Upstream: an intention to concentrate on the idea of rhythm.
Later, during a research session in sound recording, I held a heavy box full of various objects in my hands:
The trembling imposed by the weight of the object on the arm muscles amplified and revealed a natural kind of nervousness; everything trembles, vibrates, wriggles, oscillates, clashes microscopically.
The way is prepared - it is leading me to maintain and explore this trembling, to go through this sensation with delicacy. Noticing the infinite poem of these shocks and their repercussions, and still playing with this rough bell and by doing so, producing clatter and jumble, tintamarres and capharnaüms ... . Like a "rat in a toolbox" ... .
After this poetic and musical field was opened, a desires for rhythm and rhythms of desire emerged. Sentimental feverishness, energies of desire and covetousness, in a writing in sections – where memory is constantly required.


Exposé du crible

Exposé du crible. (Presentation of the sieve)
14'. 2008. 8 tracks
Commissioned by INA-Grm. Creation 24 May 2008. Radio-France / INA-Grm

Sort
First of all in the luxuriant concrete. Distinguish according to intentions.
Carrying small attentions.
Small units in the illusion of large numbers. Fiction of quantity.
And since it is a question of separating the good from the bad, I dismiss negative connotations of debt and bullets.
I retain the ecstatic look of Saint Sebastian.
Cupid shoots the arrows?
Hence sieve as a principle of porosity, of penetration, of marriage through the surface.
Sky riddled with stars, meticulous animosities of embers.
Introducing organisation, artifice. Sieving lines, mechanisation, pulsation...
And sift through the moment.
To expose this.