MotusElectronique liveacousmonium

Concerts 24.03.2021

Like all the events programmed in these difficult times of pandemic, the Motus concert was given without an audience on the stage of the Auditorium of the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris on March 2nd, captured and then retransmitted on the company's youtube page.

Led by its director Vincent Laubeuf, Motus is a musical company dedicated to so-called acousmatic electroacoustic music, which can only be heard through loudspeakers. No instrumentalists on stage, but fifty or more loudspeakers - the Motus acousmonium - of different size, quality and colour, connected to a broadcasting console. The console is controlled by the performer-acoustician who is responsible for giving the sound its spatial dimension.

The performer does not appear on the screen during the broadcast of the five pieces, the camera focusing on the visual support that accompanies the music, a static image or video for two of them. 

On the other hand, this same camera focuses on the expert hands of Vincent Laubeuf during the four "electronic live" miniatures that ensure the sound continuum of the concert: "theuse of miniatures as a transition between composed pieces is an idea I have been developing for a number of years. It is a desire to make the concert a single 'gesture' from beginning to end, without any real break, so that the spectator remains concentrated, carried away, as he is in a long work ", Vincent Laubeuf tells us. 

The video puts us in direct link with the technological engineering and the gesture of the improviser. Exciting!

Two female composers are featured in the concert whose pieces hold our attention.Émilie Mousset 's Les passagers (2014) (1) opens up a space for the imagination and installs a very perceptive vibration-emotion. The music is a road-movie populated by breath, voices and sounds of disturbing cogs: screeching axles and hostile crows, " with the haunting presence of death camps in the background ", the composer tells us.

Il n'y a pas d'autre côté byElsa Biston (2) is elaborated in a long time (23′) with a "very small sound", an irregular and omnipresent percussion-pulsation that she gives to be heard, all at once haunting and always different. For it is the environment in which it is perceived that changes, bringing about sudden mutations that give rhythm to the large form. A very fine work on the difference, the work invites to a singular listening experience.

Captives (2020) byEdgar Nicouleau is a flowing music crossing extremely contrasted spaces and materials, from the persistent bird world to the brassy resonances probing abysmal depths. The music is coupled with a 3D image whose colour intensifies as it goes along. The penultimate piece, Ceremonies (2015), is a two-man effort by composer Nicolas Vérin and filmmaker Robert Cahen. They take us on a journey to the mountains of the Caucasus: " Reminiscences of Georgia, a meeting between tradition and modernity, poetry of the moment...", the programme notes tell us. The faces are captured up close and the funeral ritual is accompanied by sumptuous polyphony in the intensity of the sound and the beauty of the images.

Most Motus concerts include a work and a composer of reference in their programme. Tonight we pay tribute to the immense Ivo Malec (1925-2019), a man of the studio as much as a composer of instrumental writing, a tireless explorer of a world of sound revealed to him in the 1960s by the teaching of Pierre Schaeffer, " his one and only master ", as he liked to say. Luminétudes (1968) is a music of sound objects, virtuosically edited according to studio techniques: the energy of the figures that are inscribed in space, coloured materials and abrupt silences that underline the discontinuity of the subject. Malec makes the sound exist, makes it visible, as if the music were presented visually. Recurring signal sounds draw the shape: between violence and its opposite, tenderness... ". Dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer", blows a friendly voice at the end of the piece.     

Michèle Tosi  

(1) Émilie Mousset began her artistic career in the field of theatre and considers each of her sound compositions as an elaborate writing received in a space.
(2) Elsa Biston is one of the fine ears of France Musique. She puts many concerts on the air, which means that she is the artistic director of the recordings that reach your ears. She is also a composer. Her body of work includes both instrumental and electroacoustic pieces. 

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