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Experimental, written and unwritten as well as surprises: this is what theEnsemble Intercontemporain's "Grand soir numérique" poster offers, 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 the Ircam technique (Manuel Poletti at the helm) is the reference work of this "Grand soir". It is also the Cursus piece (masterpiece!) by Yan Maresz, produced in 1995. It is now part of the repertoire of trumpet players and seems to have "improved" with age, judging by the superlative quality of the spatialization in the Cité de la Musique concert hall: soaring layers, multiplication of the instrument, mirrors and polyphony of the sound strata. Never before has the piece, superbly performed tonight by Lucas Lipari-Mayer, projected such a phantasmagoria of sound.
In its resonance, four performers, Lucas Lipari-Mayer, Nicolas Crosse (double bass), Samuel Favre (percussion) and Benjamin Lévy (computer) take over the stage and federate their energies in Impro ex Machina, a collective improvisation where the machine flirts with the instruments, playing on the ambiguity of the sources and the hybridization of the sound, without the gesture being felt to be liberated: in short, it doesn't seem to be improvised!
More unexpected and the highlight of the evening, without a doubt, is this audiovisual and interactive performance with the audience, ScanAudience by Gianluca Sibaldi, whose performance from the balcony is a delight. Waves of light run over the heads of the audience on the floor. They scan the rows vertically and horizontally, analysing and scanning in real time the characteristics of the spectators' morphologies, clothes and other particularities: all this information is digitised and converted into sound and synthetic images. Geometrical figures and moving textures are made and unmade on the screen. Pulsation, granulation, frames, electronic frequencies, coloured breath and rhythmic energy feed the intermittent then continuous sound flow. It is carried by a slight acceleration process induced by an increasingly rapid and scrutinizing scan. It is ingenious and funny, spectacular and finely conducted by our three performers, Marco Monfardini, Amélie Duchow (SCHNITT duo) and Gianluca Sibaldi, designer of the system and the computer programming.
The conductor Léo Margue - he was the EIC's assistant until June 2021 - only intervenes in the second half of the evening to conduct two pieces with the precision and commitment that we know him for. In the Chamber Concerto No. 2 for twelve instruments by the Serbian Jug Marković, the musicians form an arc around the conductor, alternating strings and winds: a positioning that favours 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 clamours and cries where the dense textures do not exclude the solistic passages.
The Greek composer Sofia Avramidou (a student of Ircam's Cursus 2020) brings together the large ensemble (with two pianos) and electronics in Géranomachie. The term refers to the battles of migratory birds and dwarfs in Greek mythology. It is an ambitious project and a risky sound exploration that is very/too short and cuts short after only ten minutes. Imagination is at work in this dreamlike and fantastic 3D vision where instrumental and electronic sources merge. The space of struggle investing abyssal registers (astonishing sound impacts in the ultra-low register) is crossed by enigmatic voices and invites to an immersive listening in which one would have liked to dive more durably.
The Island is the eighth collaboration between sound artist Franck Vigroux and video artist Kurt d'Haeseleer, a co-writing with a performative dimension in which the artists are on stage, both designers and performers. For the audiovisual work is finalised in situ and in real time. An activist for the protection of the environment, The Island is inspired by stories denouncing the damage caused by industrialisation (sunken villages, dam construction, etc.) and the profound geographical and human upheavals for which they are responsible: an inspiring theme from which "objects with synaesthetic 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 in the memory both the image and its concomitant sound trace, the collaborative work deploying in both dimensions a very wide spectrum of visuals and suggestive sounds that brought this experimental and prospective evening to an intense close.
Michèle Tosi
