d’incise — Incendies (Insub / La République des Granges)
First some translations. Incendies means fires, and d’incise means “of incise.” The latter is the nom du song of Laurent Peter, a Swiss experimental musician who has worked in folk-infused La Tène, dub-inspired Diatribes and communal Insub Meta Orchestra, all ensembles that have explored the manufacture, manipulation and repetition of sound. He also tests the parameters of techno under the name Tresque (And Three). His tools have varied across and within all of these projects, but a dispassionate curiosity about the material at hand has persisted.
Two and a half years have passed since the last time Dusted checked in on d’incise, at which time he and his frequent partner Cyril Bondi were making music from and about cowbells. Since then, d’incise has abandoned his former project-by-project restlessness and settled up on a particular set of tools — analog electronics, sampling technology and loudspeakers. On Incendies, he applies them to a process that uses repetition to unlock change. Sounds are recorded, processed, played, and re-recorded. These elements are strung end-to-end, and new ones are added. On “Incendies (1),” a sequence of buzzes morph over an insistently repeated pitch that sounds like a synthetic recreation of a plucked string. The next track, similarly named and sequentially numbered, pitches a beginning sproing up and down, then degrades the split sounds while sustaining their rhythm until they’re quite unrecognizable from the original sounds. While the two pieces on the LP’s flip side use different tones and transform them differently, they are similarly systematic.
The title is a multipurpose prompt. Most obviously, listening to this hypnotically repetitious but endlessly changing music can be a lot like staring into flames. And what’s that good for? Reverie. Let your mind go and you might find yourself entranced by the music’s tension between constants and irregularities. Or, d’incise suggests, you can ponder the carbon footprint of his creative efforts. And why stop there? These pulses can take you anywhere.
French musician Sébastien Roux is an inveterate sonic explorer, utilizing an engineering background in computer signal processing to develop compositions, multi-channel sound installations, radio pieces and site-specific performances. Over the course of the last 20 years, he has released recordings like More Songs and Quatuor which use the individual parts of Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 10” as the basis for an electroacoustic exploration of form and timbre. Inevitable Music #5 is a sonic translation of Sol Lewitt’s instructions for wall drawings composed for the Dedalus Ensemble while Musiques D'ordinateur is computer music developed from formal investigations into algorithmic procedures. Roux’s most recent release, Les disparitions (the disappearances) is a series of studies for viola, voice, cello and electronics which delve into the nature of sound and its decay; how does sound disappear and how does one perceive that departure?
Over the course of eight pieces, the composer uses verbal scores which “oscillate between actions to be performed and descriptions of a sound or a state of consciousness to be produced.” The ensemble (violist Cyprien Busolini, vocalist Yannick Guédon, Roux employing electronics, and cellist Deborah Walker) are deployed in a variety of combinations for these sonic explorations. Over the course of 11 minutes on “dans le silence” (in silence), the quartet voices a chord and then lets it slowly wane, exposing overtones and timbral vacillations as memory gradually fills in the disappearing fundamentals. Figure and ground are the building blocks of “la figure et le fond,” with sustained vocal tones shadowed by subtle string textures. One barely notices the string textures until they decay into silence at the end of the vocal phrases. In listening, one’s focus makes continual shifts between the full-toned resonance of the vocals and the shifting elusive specter of the strings. Dense clouds of filtered frequencies examine the inverse on “dans le nuage de bruit” as they subsume the fundamentals and harmonics of a note voiced on the viola, morphing tonality into wispy textures.
The massed pulsations of dissonance are the underpinnings of “dans l’autre” as viola and cello move between triads within an octave while electronics and vocals intone the fixed fundamental of the chords, revealing diaphanous beating interactions of the modulating voicings. Timbre and tonality is examined from a different perspective on “l’instrument disparaît, la note reste” as a single note seamlessly moves from one player to another with imperceptible overlaps which expose the elemental sonic properties of the respective instruments across a through-trajectory of a sustained tone. The study of sonic erasure defines “des traces” by eliminating notes from an electronically voiced chord, triggered by the introduction of notes from viola, cello and voice, baring the audible traces of the respective, absent tones.
The density of tonic interaction is explored with “35 combinaisons (pour Fred B.)” where the group traverses the 35 three-tone chords that can be constructed with seven notes, creating an accrued sense of the fundamental note of the chords which is never played. The recording ends with “la cascade du bout du monde,” constructed from field recordings of a waterfall. Over the course of 8 short recordings, Roux moved further and further away from the sound source. But while the sound of the waterfall becomes more and more faint, the core sonics are still perceived. The piece ends with a minute of silence, framing the previous recordings of the waterfall as well as the preceding seven pieces. The utilization of silence itself and one’s perception of it have become increasingly prevalent in improvisation and composition. But Roux’s immersion into methods of perceiving the transition between sound and its decay into silence offers a strikingly unique perspective.
Projet/ Réalisation du logo et de toute la charte graphique pour sensibiliser les citoyens à l’importance des transports et à leur impact environnemental.
