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Inventing, playing and listening: these are the three actions that animate the spirit of the Biennale des Musiques Exploratoires(BIME), led by its two artistic directors, Anouck Avisse and Sebastian Rivas. The fruitful encounter at Le Périscope between Jérôme Combier's Cairn ensemble and Jean-François Laporte's Totem Contemporain is a case in point.
Inventing: that's what Canadian Jean-François Laporte has been doing since 1998, when his first acoustic instruments (wind instruments using compressed air, living membranes, oscillators, aerophones, etc.) "created and elaborated with care thanks to our love and passion for raw materials and sound materials", says this passionate inventor. "Latex as a vibrating material had never been used in music before," he adds. Three instruments were selected for the concert: two tables de Babel (a colorful multi-instrument consisting of two membrane bowls, a pipe, eight "insects", several vibrating membranes and a free latex electron), a veritable compressed-air orchestra placed on either side of the stage; in between, the siren organ, which also uses pulsating compressed air in "heavy truck sirens", is reminiscent of the Italian Futurists' noise machines!
Totem_Instrument_Teaser from Totem Contemporain on Vimeo.
Playing: driven by a policy of creation, a hundred or so works have already been conceived for Totem Contemporain; but this is undoubtedly the first time that its members have met the musicians of the Cairn ensemble, even if the collaboration between Jean-François Laporte and Jérôme Combier goes back a long way. Three instrumentalists, Christelle Séry (electric guitar), Ayumi Mori (sib clarinet and bass clarinet) and Sylvain Lemètre (percussion) take up the challenge alongside the Canadian musicians of Totem (Jean-François Laporte, Francis Leduc and Émilie Girard-Charest) in this co-production in which each partner has commissioned two composers of their choice.
Listening: on the one hand, the fine-tuned instruments of classical lutherie, responding as precisely as possible to the codes of composition; on the other, instruments that are essentially fragile, even unpredictable, raising the question of notation, and whose improbable materials (latex, in particular) can easily be altered in the course of use, altering listening perspectives: these are the starting points integrated into the project of each composer heard this evening.
Sweden's Jesper Nordin is no stranger to Totem Contemporain, for which he has already written. In his explicitly titled fifteen-minute piece, Close Encounter of the Second Kind , Cairn 's instruments emerge from the dark flow of Totem, vibraphone notes, electric guitar effluvia and a trembling clarinet line in a beautifully colored floating texture. A sonic explosion in the middle of the work - pedals allow this kind of impulse - opens the floodgates of air (compressed) and sound (the siren organ), before the energy subsides and the piece returns to the calm of the beginning.
The stridulations of "insects" and a dense flow surrounded by the low notes of the siren organ dominate the beginning of voir dans le secret by British composer Michael Edwards, present in the hall. The piece, which incorporates a number of fixed sounds, suffers from an excess of information within a somewhat confused dramaturgy in which the instrumental writing struggles to fit in.
Canadian composer Émilie Girard-Charest has a very different approach, playing her own piece alongside the five other musicians on one of Babel's tables. Beginning dal niente, Limaille invites us to listen sharply, in the in-between of sound and the slow evolution of the spectrum up to its noisy deployment: beats, differential sounds, the vagaries of breath, vibratory phenomena and resulting sounds are heard under the joint action of the Totem instruments, highlighted in their singularity, and those of Cairn. Limaille is a tense meditation opening onto unexpected sound perspectives.
Each new piece requires a re-tuning of the Totem. Samuel Sighicelli's title Impetus Machine Overflow Rush Fallout, which is difficult to translate, speaks volumes about the energy of gesture and the dazzling playfulness that go into the composition: "You make this instrument your own pretty quickly," he confides to Guillaume Kosmicki, in charge of the biennial's brochure; "It's not difficult to access, but the mastery of detail is more arduous, of course," he adds. In this proximity to jazz and its singular phrasing, Sighicelli explores the Totem in a rhythmic dimension and virtuosically articulates the two sound sources: vitality of color and plasticity of sound with the activity of latex and that of the electric guitar engaging the effects of seven pedals! The chiseling of the contours and the work of amplification and spatialization give real relief to the Totem instruments alongside the instrumental writing and its melodic perspectives. Pulsating, often repetitive sequences alternate with longer, smoother, less written, more performative tracks, giving the siren organ's timbre and breath time to unfold freely: the friction between the two "sonic skins" is as physical as it is pleasurable, remarkably performed by our six musicians in perfect osmosis.
Michèle Tosi
