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Experimental, written and unwritten, as well as a few surprises: that's what's on the bill for theEnsemble Intercontemporain's "Grand soir numérique", at the crossroads of the visual and sound arts and on the lookout for technological advances.
25 years old for Metallics! The piece for trumpet and electronics using Ircam technology (Manuel Poletti at the helm) is the reference work for this "Grand soir". It is also Yan Maresz 's 1995 Cursus piece (masterpiece!). Today, it is part of the repertoire of trumpet players, and seems to have "improved" with age, judging by the superlative quality of the spatialization in the Salle des concerts at the Cité de la Musique: soaring layers, multiplication of the instrument, mirrors and polyphony of sound strata. Never before has the piece, superbly performed tonight by Lucas Lipari-Mayer, projected such a phantasmagoria of sound.
Four performers, Lucas Lipari-Mayer (bass), Nicolas Crosse (double bass), Samuel Favre (percussion) and Benjamin Lévy (computer), take to the stage and combine their energies in Impro ex Machina, a collective improvisation in which the machine flirts with the instruments, playing on the ambiguity of sources and the hybridization of sound, without the gesture seeming to break free: in short, it doesn't seem to be improvised!
More unexpected and the highlight of the evening, without a doubt, was this audiovisual and interactive performance with the audience, ScanAudience by Gianluca Sibaldi, whose performance seen from the balcony is a delight. Waves of light run over the heads of the audience on the parterre. They sweep vertically and horizontally across the rows, analyzing and scanning in real time the morphological, clothing and other characteristics of the spectators: all information digitized and converted into sound and computer-generated images. Geometric figures and moving textures appear and disappear on the screen. Pulsation, granulation, frames, electronic frequencies, colored breath and rhythmic energy feed the sound flow, intermittent then continuous. It is carried along by a slight acceleration process induced by increasingly rapid and scrutinizing scanning. It's ingenious and funny, spectacular and finely executed by our three performers, Marco Monfardini, Amélie Duchow (duo SCHNITT) and Gianluca Sibaldi, system designer and computer programmer.
Conductor Léo Margue - who has been the EIC's assistant until June 2021 - only steps in during the second half of the evening to conduct two pieces with his customary precision and commitment. In the Chamber Concerto n°2 for twelve instruments by Serbian composer Jug Marković, the musicians form an arc around the conductor, alternating strings and winds: a positioning that favors the fusion of timbres treated in long glissandi. They breathe an incantatory dimension into this intriguing piece that appeals to our imagination: a jungle perhaps, inhabited by clamors and cries where dense textures do not exclude soloistic passages.
Greek composer Sofia Avramidou (a student on Ircam's Cursus 2020) brings together large ensemble (with two pianos) and electronics in Géranomachie. Géranomachie. The term refers to the battles between migratory birds and dwarfs in Greek mythology. It's an ambitious project and a risky sonic exploration that's too short and cuts short after just ten minutes. Imagination is at work in this dreamlike, fantastical 3D vision where instrumental and electronic sources merge. The space of struggle investing abyssal registers (astonishing sound impacts in the ultra-low register) is traversed by enigmatic voices and invites an immersive listening experience into which we would have liked to plunge more durably.
The Island is the eighth collaboration between sound artist Franck Vigroux and video artist Kurt d'Haeseleer, a performative co-writing project in which the artists are both designers and performers on stage. The audiovisual work is finalized in situ and in real time. A campaigner for the protection of the environment, The Island is inspired by stories denouncing the damage caused by industrialization (sunken villages, dam construction, etc.) and the profound geographical and human upheavals for which they are responsible: an inspiring theme from which "objects with synesthetic contours are developed", says Franck Vigroux, pointing to this sought-after convergence between the thoughts of sound and image. And we have to admit that the synesthetic approach works, leaving both the image and its concomitant sound trace in the memory, the collaborative work deploying in both dimensions a very broad spectrum of suggestive visuals and sounds that brought this experimental and forward-looking evening to an intense close.
Michèle Tosi
