MUSIC

Excerpt · 3 min · full piece 11:00

Composed for a ring of eight loudspeakers surrounding the audience: a body-centred listening experience, reflecting the immersive nature of the moment that inspired the piece — the slow rocking of the waves at sunset.

This piece comes from a souvenir, The souvenir of a landscape, Blue, All around, the sea was shining, Slowly, The sun was going down, Calmly, Breath, My heart was rolling across the sand, Slowly, The night was creaking along my neck, Calmly, One is colouring the end, My mind is going away, The waves are caressing my eyes, Where are you? Sweet darkness, Black, Lost, Back, I am still singing the sounds of your land, But you are gone, Speechless, I am the wind, I am the fire, Undulating like no one, I belong to the sea.

Excerpt · 3 min · full piece 10:34

Standard stereophonic configuration: a pair of loudspeakers in front of the audience.

This piece is an epic poem: a journey through the night, black, dense and mysterious, ending with the appearance of dawn. It is inspired by Nyx, goddess of the night in Greek mythology. Hesiod’s Theogony describes Nyx, daughter of Chaos, as one of the first-born elemental deities. The myth says that each day at twilight she leaves the underworld to travel across the sky, laying down a dark veil of mist drawn from the depths, which blots out the light of Aether, the shining upper air, until dawn returns. The piece is made of transparencies, slow transformations and strong contrasts of sound morphology. Nyx can be perceived as a cubist work, describing an object from different perspectives. It is also dramatic, expressing the despair of living in a world that refuses to reveal its reality. I dedicate this piece to those who believe in the impossible…

Excerpt · 3 min · full piece 10:12

Composed in the 32-channel multichannel studio of the Université de Montréal, for a dome of sixteen loudspeakers. The dome is treated as an organic being in motion, passing through different spatial states: moments where the listener is wrapped in a slowly moving texture, like spreading fog or falling rain, alternate with trajectories that can be precisely located and followed. Plan of the original 16-channel version.

Uni-vers(e) immerses the listener in an ambivalent world, between fragility and determination. Its form follows the beginning and the evolution of a relationship between two people, a mixture of joy and torment. Duality and contrast are everywhere in the piece. They can be heard spectrally, in the heaviness of the percussion and the lightness of the grains, and morphologically, between the excitement of the iterations and the fluidity of the harmonic profiles. The spatial composition sets wide spatial trajectories against the stillness of other sounds. Uni-vers(e) is part of my thesis portfolio, which questions the relationships between visual composition and acousmatic composition. Composed as a dome piece during a residency in the studios of the Université de Montréal (CA), at the invitation of Robert Normandeau, it was completed at the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester (UK).

Excerpt · 3 min · full piece 10:21

Composed for a sixteen-channel system recreating the shape of a dome. The piece opens with a few sounds coming from above, like sparkling drops of water falling at random; they gradually accumulate until the listener is immersed in a sound bath. The space then rocks — forward and backward, left and right — before sudden appearances and disappearances of sounds across the speakers evoke being in the middle of a storm.

An Ocean on the Moon is an acousmatic piece that explores a maritime theme through the evolution of a soft yet shiny, joyful and destructive instrumental netting texture. A particular emphasis is placed on the diversity of sensations that may overwhelm a viewer in front of the sea, between memories of joyful moments, lonely wandering and sudden fear. This piece is an evocation of visual and kinetic experiences of the sea. Through this project, I studied the rich expressivity of instrumental gestures, sometimes methodically, sometimes impulsively. I have also explored composerly gestures which, at each stage of the creative process, work from the fluidity of drawn shapes: curved, voluptuous, and sometimes extreme. This project resulted from a collaboration with several instrumentalists who performed musical sequences based on visual images and video clips. I thank Theodoros Lotis very much for his warm welcome at the Ionian University, for his listening and support during this project. I also thank Andreas Mniestris and Dionissis Batjakis for their help, and the beautiful people and talented musicians who took part in this project: Alex Retsis, Elesa Papakosta-Smyri, Giorgos Stavridis, Rrezarta Krougia, Sevastianos Motorinos, Niki Kokkoli, Ektoras Remsak, Nafsika Karagianaki, Stelios Michas-Eglezos, Anna Katagi and Sofia Ketentzian.

“On Sundays, hidden by the shadow of the Moon, She performs a ritual that never comes to an end… Again and again… she wakes without a body And warns every creature that the time will come… Soon, we hope, they answer, And she replies: later… But as time goes by, they are all gone…” The piece refers to the legend of the White Lady of Tonneville, in Normandy. It is said that the ghost of a young woman dressed all in white sometimes appears around Tonneville to lead travellers astray… It was composed with sounds recorded at the Visby International Centre for Composers (VICC), as a commission from Dante Tanzi for the album Awakenings, part of the Obs / akousma / AUDIOR series edited by Denis Shapovalov and Dante Tanzi.

Eight loudspeakers form a ring around a slightly transparent curtain. Inside, an empty space in semi-darkness, with just enough light to make out the speakers and the other listeners. No fixed seating, no imposed direction: each person chooses to sit, to stay still or to wander. A Max patch acts like the wind in a tree’s foliage. On a fixed sixteen-minute cycle, it draws from six pools of sound sequences, choosing at random which files are played and where they appear in space. Moments of near stillness alternate with dense, enveloping textures; towards the end of each cycle the sound thins out into calm, then the patch resets and opens a new perspective on the same materials. No two listenings are alike.

To be experienced in situ

This sound installation is an immersive, evolving sound environment. The visual observation of natural phenomena is an important source of inspiration in my research. For this project, I have chosen to explore the visual observation of tree foliage and to evoke musically its visual and tactile features, and the proprioceptive sensations it provides. The tree is also a symbol. It echoes the life energy of nature that nourishes each living creature. A tree is life and also death, motion and stillness. Here, the temporal and spatial deployment of sounds is automatically generated. In a future version of the project, this will be interactive. The installation is a journey where the audience is invited to sit or to wander in space. Derrière un arbre, se cache une forêt… I thank Pete Batchelor very much for his support in this project.

Excerpt · 3 min · full piece 8:37

Standard stereophonic configuration: a pair of loudspeakers in front of the audience.

Nothing ever ends. But some people won’t be seen again. Is there any logic, any rule to follow? Why are they not moving? Give me your hands, I want to draw a smile on their faces. You are flirting with your own end. Give me your eyes, Let’s start again.

Excerpt · 3 min

— Who are you? — You appeared to me in a place that doesn’t exist. — Were you real? — You have never seen me, and I have never seen you. — How did I manage to talk to you? — I don’t know… — Give me a clue! — I only remember… — Open the door! Open the door! I want to smell, to touch, to feel, to caress her… — Why? You might regret it! Many others were like you, burning with desire… But in the end, all of them gave up and turned away from her. — No, I won’t… — It’s too late anyway. Long gone are the days of lightness, love and happiness. Today no one knows, no one wants to remember… where she has gone. — Why? — Hope disappeared a long time ago. Since then, looking for Freedom, looking for that lady, is meaningless. Without hope, being free no longer makes sense.

Excerpt · 3 min

There is nothing, It is like an experience, a life. It takes shape, It breathes, Doors slam, Paths cross, And what if all this were only a game, Why? The quest for an endless dream…

No one must see, No one must know, Crouched in a corner, reality waits, Time passes and ideas burst forth, Everything is written and unbound, A breath, a longing, To leave, To leave far away, and never come back…

If my piece were alive, it would speak as follows: “If I were a season, I would be autumn, I would have long curly hair, and under my feet there would be a cloud of onions dancing only on the memory of my grandmother. I would taste melancholy with passion and desire, I would play at sewing, to be dressed in threads and knots so tangled they could never be undone, And then I would forget myself, to finally… sleep…”

This piece is like a piece of life, a bit of hope, a longing for elsewhere, a dream… Through it, I evoke the human being and our relationship with time, between strength and fragility. For some of us, time means fate: a hostile force that marks us a little more each day. It even seems that it is because time passes that our ideals and our wildest dreams vanish and are lost in oblivion. For others, time is an elixir they drink easily, an inexhaustible source of wealth, experiences, sensations and emotions. For others still, time is a friend they greet each day, eyes sparkling with impatience at the thought of discovering the surprises it has in store for them. Yet one thing is certain: time cannot be controlled… and yet, it is tempting. So how can we handle those moments when things, when our lives, suddenly change beyond recognition? There is no real recipe. Just an idea: could these decisive moments be opportunities to revive our forgotten dreams, and to believe… again… I dedicate this piece to a surreal and surprising encounter, and to all those still to come…

Excerpt · 3 min

Sound installation in octophony: eight loudspeakers in a ring around the audience.

The SMN, recently born, it still breathes today… was presented during the exhibition Voyez-Vous in Colombelles (FR). It was commissioned by Voyez-Vous, Transat Vidéo, Caen. For decades, the SMN (Société Métallurgique de Normandie) was at the centre of daily life for many of the town’s inhabitants. In the 1990s the plant was dismantled, then reassembled in Asia a few months later, leaving people melancholic, and some of them without work. The piece gathers fragments of memories from former SMN workers living in Colombelles. It features M. Boisseau, M. and Mme Groult, Mme Le Net, M. Morel, M. Prokop, Mme Quideau, M. Vromet, and the team of the Colombelles library.