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Sacred fragrances in the convent of the Minimes. For its concert programmed as part of the Prospectives XXII festival of the Conservatoire de Perpignan (recorded without an audience and broadcast on youtube), the Flashback collective settled in the cloister of the Couvent des Minimes, the ideal place to host this audiovisual phantasmagoria.
The sumptuous space allows the instrumental sound to unfold freely, amplified and even transformed by the electronics that are always present in Flashback's concert-shows. The two performers on stage, pianist Clarisse Varihl and accordionist Fanny Vicens, are immersed in an immersive environment conceived by visual artist Thomas Pénanguer, who uses an extremely sensitive visual imagination to serve the music. Two composers will be featured, the Frenchman Alexander Vert, director of Flashback, and the Peruvian Juan Arroyo, whose new work Monolithe will be given its world premiere.
Clarisse Varihl is at the piano to perform Nuages by Alexander Vert, a nod to Debussy and his outdoor music: transparency, mobility and vibratory quality of sound textures bathed in resonance and multiple echoes. The electronics provide the spatial scope of the sound continuum, investing all registers of the instrument under the crystalline playing of the performer. The title of the second piece, Turn on, Tune in, Drop out , focuses on the future of sounds. The work is written for microtonal accordion (tuned in quarter tones). Fanny Vicens, joined by her accordionist partner Jean-Étienne Sotty, with whom they form the duo Xamp, conceived the prototype in 2015 with the help of the instrument maker Philippe Imbert, endowing the instrument with a finer "grain", more impalpable too, the quarter tone sometimes disturbing the sound matter. Vert's accordion is a living body from which strange voices emerge that the electronics process live and remodel as they please. The sumptuous low notes that Fanny Vicens draws from her instrument give a shiver.
Monolithe, the piece given its world premiere, is the result of a month-long residency by the composer at Flashback's "lab" in Perpignan. Of Peruvian origin and living in Paris, Juan Arroyo works extensively with new technological tools. He has worked with Ircam's MaxMSP software and granular synthesis for this new and very impressive piece that brings together piano, accordion and electronics. " Monolith is a stone on which I have engraved messages addressed to loved ones via Morse code. I also transposed musically the gesture of the hand that rests on the stone as if to leave its mark on it ," confides the composer.
The music is conceived in a continuous flow with deep resonances that unfolds and is seen simultaneously; the material is dense, streaked with violent scratches, the two instruments being sometimes immersed in the electronic maelstrom, buried under the wave before reappearing in their acoustic nakedness. Delicately chiselled, the last pages of the score reinstate a vertical dimension, with the help of Thomas Pénanguer's images: a moment of singular emotion that is part of a suspended time where the order of ritual is established.
Michèle Tosi
