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From the Drôme, where he settled this summer after a long stint in Marseille, eRikm looks back on his approach to field recording, which informs his work on "concrete post-music".
Coming from a rock background, eRikm is an instinctive musician whose musical culture is nourished by physical impact, electricity and DIY. But he has also retained from his training in the visual arts an approach to sound work that is both plastic and conceptual. eRikm is above all an artist perpetually in search of new knowledge, new encounters, new lands to explore. " I feel like I've been in transition all my life", he writes in Repères, the beautiful text he penned for the score of Luc Ferrari'sArchives sauvées des eaux, luxuriously published in 2018 by Maison ONA. Although he first made a name for himself as a "platinist" (nothing to do with the mythical number 10 of the French soccer team: these are musicians - turntablists in English - who, like Otomo Yoshihide or Martin Tétreault, make the vinyl turntable and the record object the raw materials of their work) in the mid-1990s, his practice has since expanded in many directions, between musique concrète and free improvisation.
Field recording has always played an important and singular role in this practice. An integral part of his sound palette from the outset, field recordings have given rise to a wide variety of uses: radio plays and electroacoustic narrations(Draugalimur, 2014, inspired by a tale from Iceland and recorded there; L'Aire de la Moure, 2013, after Eluard; or his Atelier de Création Radiophonique on the Innus), for France Culture, 2017, mixed pieces(Potsdamer Platz, incorporating a phonography of the reconstruction of the Berlin square, in 2000; Fata Morgana, created by the ensemble Dédalus in 2021). Sometimes, the pieces are totally impromptu, like the one that makes up the moving LP Visitation, a totally spontaneous post-mortem tribute to the friend Luc Ferrari, a sound capture, a phonography of a moment: "In the place where I was living at the time, Çap15, an artistic wasteland in the northern districts of Marseille, lived an owl. It's the 'beep' you hear in Luc Ferrari's Presque rien n° 2. One evening, I was at home, in my studio, and this owl started to sing. I took my recorder and put Luc's record on in the studio, loud enough to make them sing at the same time...". Pieces, most often, totally unclassifiable, like this Doubse Hystérie (2013), a dilated memory of a train journey through the Jura Arc, punctuated by a reflection on male hysteria. What all these compositions have in common is their totally anti-naturalistic use of field recording: what interests eRikm in the sounds he can capture, such as those of beluga whales, for example, is their analogy with the parasitic noises and digital accidents he generates elsewhere...
The question of field recording takes on particular significance if we relate it to the search for a "concrete post-music" that has occupied him since 2005, as he explained in 2019 in a text for the magazine LINKS. This research, applied to lutherie, has led him to invent new tools "sometimes going as far as the concept of entropy, to use the support by pushing it to its paroxysm". Using his 3Kpad ∞, linking three Kaoss Pads(1) in a closed circuit, he developed, with GMEM, the Idiosyncrasy process, which uses real-world sound sources from the Internet, mainly from Soundmap software. Capturing flows and processing them in real time, sounds that are elusive rather than fixed, a kind of ephemeral, untraceable field recording, but of a constantly shifting terrain, is also a way of taking a position, poetically and politically, in today's world.
As someone who has long worked with existing materials and found objects, what was your early attitude to the use of environmental sounds? Did you ever capture sounds yourself?
Actually, I've always used field recording, because it's part of an electroacoustic practice in itself. Even if, in my early days, it was mainly my work on vinyl that people remembered, Zygosis, my first solo album, for example, is full of it. I've always done that, in fact - well, from the moment I started asking myself questions, getting out of rock, basically. There are even field recordings on my first rock album, This is Daddy Long Legs, 1992, which was recently reissued. I couldn't remember, but there are lots of sounds of bees, wasps, playing guitars instead of guitars (laughs)... Although I've been doing this for a long time, it's developed more in the last fifteen years or so. Now, a large part of the basic sound sources come from outside...
When you started out, was sound recording important to you, or was it still rather rudimentary?
It was rudimentary, because I couldn't afford anything professional at all. Besides, I've always been a tinkerer. My background is in the plastic arts, so the basis of my work was recycling, and I've always worked with ordinary equipment: a Walkman at the beginning, and then the MiniDisc, which simplified things a lot from the mid-1990s onwards... There were a lot of us doing that. I remember the first time I met Andrew (Sharpley, ed.), from Stock, Hausen & Walkman, in Canada, in the toilets at the Victoriaville festival, because we were interested in the same ventilation sound (laughs)....
So field recordings were just one of many sound elements - sounds of nature as well as industrial sounds - that enriched the corpus of sound you used?
You know, I have a very rock culture. The first things that interested me were my parents' Pink Floyd records. With Joy Division, there were outside sounds: Martin Hannett was someone who recorded silence to add mass to the music... There's even field recording at the end of Téléphone's Dure limite !... All that fascinated me. All of a sudden, it puts you in another context, it takes the music elsewhere. I used field recordings as a way of stimulating listening and curiosity.
And then, at some point in the early 2000s, I realized that the digital sounds I was accelerating or slowing down - by reducing hour-long recordings to sequences of two or three minutes, for example, for installations: the school of sampling, in other words - that these sounds existed underwater, in what was still called "nature". The revelation came when I discovered the sounds of the beluga whale, which I then went to record in Canada. After that, it became an open book, and that's something I've really developed over the last few years...
Did your encounter with Luc Ferrari contribute to the development of your practice of "electroacoustic storytelling", as The Wire put it on The Mistpouffers CD? Or was it because you'd already started working in this vein that you wanted to meet him?
It wasn't me who wanted to meet Luc - I'd never have dared! -It came from him, through the intermediary of composer Lucien Bertolina, in Marseille in 2002. Luc was very keen on the idea, and there was something about the tools my generation was using that his generation would have liked to have had at the time... He needed this relationship with live music, and wanted to be on stage. When I discovered them in the 1990s, his pieces Presque rien n° 1 and n° 2 really struck a chord with me, because they open up an imaginary world that's linked to childhood, and that's an imaginary world I have, too: I grew up in that environment, and it's not for nothing that I live in the mountains today... Luc's influence, in a way, came through porosity, over time, without me realizing it right away. More than in the link with the outside world, I think it's to be found in an erotic relationship with sound. Luc was first and foremost an urban dweller, using the outside more like a painter. He was a painter of sound, someone who, instead of using space per se, deposited his art in spaces... "Naturalistic" field recording doesn't interest me at all.
So, what led you to travel to Canada to record beluga whales?I worked a lot with these sounds on the album Stème, released in 2008 by Room40. At the time, I was trying to work with space, in a physical rather than digital way. For example, I'd make a string of one-minute sounds that I'd manipulate, speed up and slow down, and then distribute over 5 or 6 MiniDiscs fitted with a loudspeaker. I'd place them in a space - in this case, caves in the Lot region, where there was total silence apart from the rustling of my wetsuit - and then move around with a microphone: I'd turn on all the MiniDiscs one after the other, and then physically move around this rather large space with a stereo microphone to record that recording. It's a bit like retinal persistence, but with sound. I also did the opposite: all these tape recorders that sent out sound and that I recorded with my body in space, I also used them as recorders, fitting the MiniDiscs with microphones and moving around with an electronic source in space... I then synthesized all these recordings.
In short, I made extensive use of the sharp sounds of beluga whales, which I recorded in the St. Lawrence River with hydrophones, slowing them down and filtering them a lot. The beluga is the species with the widest acoustic spectrum. It uses extremely low frequencies to hunt in silt. It's even thought to be the origin of the mermaid legends, because it's the only mammal that can modulate sound externally, rather like the dolphin. And when you listen to it, you realize that it's data, information, a bit like the sound that 16k or 32k modems used to emit... It's funny, because I was talking about it recently with Nicolas Becker, the sound engineer who just won an Oscar for his work on the film Sound of Metal, who told me that he had often used these sounds himself... On the other hand, I haven't done a subject on the beluga and its mode of communication, that's absolutely not what I'm about. I use beluga sounds as a kind of modular synthesizer!
You also worked with Hervé Glotin, who heads the bioacoustics laboratory at the CNRS in Toulon ...
Yes, I wanted to have access to hydrophone recordings. They do a lot of work on bats, as well as all the animals that live in the Toulon submarine canyon, which goes down to -2000 meters. That's where the Pelagos sanctuary is located, a huge sanctuary for marine mammals that stretches from Sicily to the Côte d'Azur... The sounds that Hervé Glotin gave me, I transposed to the orchestra, in a piece that was premiered this year by theDedalus ensemble, Fata Morgana. The source of this piece is purely field recording. In addition to the sounds of Hervé Glotin, there are also quite a few sounds of frogs that I recorded in Tasmania (where there are certain endemic varieties that produce a kind of minimal music, with beats and phase shifts à la Steve Reich, but also in Ardèche... I transposed this to an orchestra of 6 musicians, to whom I add a little modular, field recording and a few MIDI instruments: each specific animal corresponds to a musician playing a very simple score (one or two notes, no more). Some people got it wrong! It's a mixed piece, incorporating a little modular, field recording and a few MIDI instruments. The score is a mix of graphics and table writing, like the one I did with the Percussions de Strasbourg.
To what extent do environmental sounds play a role in your Echoplasmes project with the HANATSUmiroir ensemble , which incorporates sounds captured on the Internet?
This project concerns yet another system: the Soundmap, developed by the Locus Sonus department at the Ecole d'art d'Aix-en-Provence in conjunction with other universities and research centers, which I've been playing with a lot over the past 3 or 4 years. The Soundmap transposes to the sound domain what existed with webcams at a time when platforms allowed access to cameras filming subway exits in New York, for example. The community is growing, and there are more and more microphones, especially as it's accessible to everyone. Before a concert, I send a letter to everyone, they all open their microphones and I go into improvisation with these feeds. There's one I use a lot, which is in a garden at the end of the runway at Heathrow airport, where the microphone is positioned behind a hutch: from time to time, the rabbit cuts the sound source with its hair, and from time to time you can hear planes landing and taking off, behind the rabbit's breath: when it really works in concert, speeding up and slowing down the live sound, it's great (laughs )! We're really into field recording: 1/ I don't know what sources are coming in; 2/ I don't organize them because I take them at random - like I used to do with vinyl records in the old days... I've kept all these principles, with the idea - there's no longer any "fixed sound", everything is in real time, completely random, it's really Cage's Variations VII (2) - of breaking away from the dogma of electroacoustic music.
Interview by David Sanson
See eRikm in concert this autumn:
* From 6 to 16/10, a series of concerts in Canada: 6 in Matane, 7 in Rimouski, 8 in Rivière-au-Loup, 15 in Quebec City (Musique Parallèle), 16 in Montreal (Akusma festival). solo on 10 in Rimouski (with trio LÀ-Dehors, with Eric Brochard and Loïc Guénin),
* 13/11 with Franz Hautzinger, Eric Normand and T. Malmendier in Prague (Alternativa Festival).
* 4 and 5/12 with Hanatsu Miroir(Echoplasme) in Nœux-les-Mines.
