Alexander VertShared energy

Interviews 18.11.2021

The much-anticipated creation of Birds, Winds and Dreams by Alexander Vert and Thomas Pénanguer is at the forefront of the Aujourd'hui Musiques de Perpignan 2021 festival: a total and immersive show using the latest technologies developed by the Flashback structure. Its director, Alexander Vert, describes the scope of an organisation that has now conquered the international scene and looks back on his own activity as a composer within the company.  

Michèle Tosi: Alexander Vert, you founded the Perpignan-based structure Flashback in 2009 and then the Flashback ensemble in 2012, a group of seven permanent artists. If it's not yet time to take stock, can you tell us about these twelve years of operation?
Alexander Vert: Flashback is a growing organisation that continues to develop and connect with the international art scene. I created the structure on my return to France, with a view to associating today's music with new technologies and to considering sound creation in the form of an audiovisual and immersive show, like the one Thomas Pénanguer and I will be giving at the Théâtre de l'Archipel next weekend. Since 2015 we have had a season of concerts and productions that tour the world.

What is the company's scope of action today, in terms of distribution?
Far away destinations, first of all! First of all to Beijing, to the percussion festival where we go every year in August with the ensemble's percussionist Philippe Spiesser, and to Moscow, which faithfully renews its invitation. Closer to Perpignan, we also play a lot in Spain (Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Palma de Mallorca), in Switzerland, in Geneva where we collaborate with the HEM, in Basel, Zürich and Lucerne, in connection with theatre companies. We are planning tours in Canada/USA, Japan and probably Peru. Thomas Pénanguer has been invited to California for a new collaboration with the Swedish composer Jesper Nordin. We don't go to Germany and Italy very often and not enough to France, except in Toulouse, invited by Studio Eole with whom we have co-produced two CDs to date. I am hopeful that things will evolve thanks, in particular, to this new creation network set up in 2019, the RCPM (Réseau de Création Pyrénées Méditerranée) federating several structures, in Toulouse (Eole), Montpellier (Maison des Arts Sonores), Barcelona(Mixtur festival) and Mallorca, which should give us more visibility on our own territory. But all this requires a lot of shared energy!
The performers of Flashback all now have a show in which they are staged, Birds in a cage for violist Odile Auboin, Sculpt for percussionist Philippe Spiesser, Monolithe for accordionist Fanny Vicens and pianist Clarisse Varihle, 400 cents objets tombants with visual artist Thomas Köppel, productions that are just waiting to be toured in France and internationally.    

But Flashback is not only a production house...
It is also a place of research and a "Lab" that welcomes artists in residence to work on their project. Today we have state-of-the-art technological equipment that attracts many composers(Annette Mengel, Bérangère Maximin, Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi, Christophe Ruetsh, Hélène Breschand, Gérard Buquet, Juan Arroyo, etc.) to the point where the demand exceeds our capacity. And all the composers who come to work with us want to come back, or even settle in Perpignan! We also have an intense activity of mediation and cultural action, beautiful projects, notably digital opera, with the city's schools and colleges, which it is important to carry out every year.
We now need to find a permanent location, the right space that will allow us to work in the best conditions and, I sincerely hope, promote Flashback to the rank of National Centre for Musical Creation (CNCM).

Let's get back to your new creation which has been occupying you for over a year...
Birds, Winds and Dreams is my first state commission, worth 10,000 euros (we've had two more since!). The play was on the bill for the Aujourd'hui Musiques 2020 festival, which was cancelled due to the pandemic. It's a risky venture and a huge investment, both in terms of time and money; financial support allowed us to buy the panels to install the 10 x 10 metre cube in which the show is performed. We had to make a VR (virtual reality) version with an Oculus headset and binaural broadcasting to work in the studio, Thomas and I. The laboratory was enriched with sixteen new loudspeakers, two rings of eight, which constitute the ambisonic vault under which the 80 listeners in the cube will be placed. Thomas Pénanguer has acquired a new computer, a rather intriguing-looking machine that allows him to control six projectors at the same time: this high-tech equipment constitutes a real technological advance for the "Labo", tools that we hope will be reinvested by other composers for future projects.

The title, Birds, Winds and Dreams, is nothing less than suggestive, opening up the horizons very widely...
The piece completes a cycle on birds, and more particularly on starlings, which travel in flocks in the Roussillon sky according to hallucinating trajectories that have been the subject of very precise studies. I also travelled a lot in my head with birds, and then I became interested in the people who talk to birds. I then discovered that the language of birds is similar to the language of alchemists and, from symbol to symbol, I went back to the Egyptians!

To follow the theme of travel, I'd like to go back to your own career, which includes several years in distant lands, three years in India, a year in Australia, several months in Japan and South America, before you returned to Perpignan a dozen years ago. Can this life experience, this discovery of other cultures and other music, since you have never stopped making it, be felt in your creation?
Not directly; no exotic elements or colours can be detected in what I write. It's more a life path and a singular listening that are part of a certain way of doing things. Travelling to these countries, which are so different from our culture, gave me the experience of an unheard-of freedom of space and time. I had the possibility to be in the middle of very strange things and to take the time to inhabit reality at its own tempo. I could let the world inspire me again. It wasn't always easy; I had to change gurus four times in India before I was accepted as a student; I ran into the language barrier in Japan and the encounter with the music business was all the longer and more difficult. But my determination to make music no matter what never wavered and I used all the resources of my imagination to achieve this. I must admit that this journey was also a "love journey", a journey of my female loves, which took me all over the world!  

Can we talk about a singular temporal experience, which seems tangible to me in your music?
Certainly; an experience of long time, like in a raga, which I live fully in my practice as an improviser. As soon as I returned to France, in order to survive, I set up a jazz-oriented improvisation group where we sometimes played for five, six hours or more. With the sampler and the computer, I've kept this very strong relationship with improvisation, with live sound generation and a certain dimension of orality in my music. I like singing a lot, inspired by traditional, melismatic and ornamental practices that I have heard here and there. We could talk about the English adaptations I made of Qawwali singing when I was in India. These are all elements and personal practices that feed my writing and run through my compositional work.  

We will be listening next weekend for the creation, on the Grenat stage of theThéâtre de l'Archipel, of Birds, Winds and Dreams, which you co-direct with Thomas Pénanguer: a show at the crossroads of music, stage and technological practices. Not to be missed!  

Beyond the wind

It is the low notes of the spectrum that begin the sound adventure. They make the membrane of the subs vibrate, these loudspeakers dedicated to the reproduction of the lowest frequencies, before the floodgates of sound open in Birds, Winds and Dreams, given as a world premiere on the Grenat stage.

A stormy wind (force 9) then rises, carrying all sorts of materials and streaked with lightning: clouds of starlings in moving layers criss-cross the air while the wind falls, giving way to a tonic hullabaloo. The trajectories and bird calls become movements and matter detached from their model under the effect of the filters and distortions of the machine. We are above the clouds, in the blue of the sky (music of weightless spheres) before crossing other zones of turbulence. The texture is denser and the music pulses, building up in successive layers. One hears distant rumours that set the space ablaze, with an intensity increased tenfold by the flow of images. The images are projected onto the four walls of the cube (it is better to stand at one of its corners) and onto its upper surface via six projectors controlled by a computer.

It is Alexander Vert's music that stimulated the imagination of video artist Thomas Pénanguer and gave birth to the video that interacts with the sounds: a very fine work carried out on the motif, that of the clouds, the red thread of the montage, whose representation in black and white alters, moves away from the model to become pure abstraction.Work also on transparency (these supple morphologies that contort themselves in the void), on the forms of the wind, kinetic energy and vertiginous falls: in short, a bluffing pyrotechnics, which operates before our eyes, alters the materials and makes the colours burst forth.
With Thomas Pénenguer, music is drawn, painted and sculpted!

The audiovisual experience is to be lived in situ, in the semi-recumbent position favoured by the deckchairs: unprecedented and unheard of!

Interview by Michèle Tosi

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