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Founder and artistic director of the Distorsions company, based in Nancy since 2013, composer Hervé Birolini has been passionate about electrical energy for the past few months. A source of inspiration that makes sparks fly! Interview.
Hervé Birolini, Des éclairs is the title of your latest creation. Can you tell us about it?
Des éclairs is the first piece by the Distorsions company to focus on the question of electrical energy. I'm leaving a cycle of pieces devoted to the link between sound, space and movement, created with choreographer and dancer Aurore Gruel: Core in 2017, Exartikulations in 2018, with its wall of loudspeakers, and Manipulation, a choreographic piece, in 2020. Aurore and I have been working together for over ten years, and we've been wondering about the common ground between music and dance. Our triptych thus explores the different relationships between sound, space and movement.
CORE Working stage from Herve Birolini on Vimeo.
EXARTIKULATIONS from Herve Birolini on Vimeo.
MANIPULATION - recreation oct2020 from ORMONE on Vimeo.
Then I stumbled on the electron and became very interested in electricity. It's an interest that echoes my educational background: I have an electronics baccalaureate, then studied maths and physics at university, before branching off into film studies. "Des éclairs" is a way of looking at energy, of making visible what is essentially invisible. The piece, which lasts around forty minutes, features a set-up of eight vertical neon lights and Ruhmkorff coils, installed in front of me. I stand behind them, like the operator of a power station!
The music is purely electronic, mixed with the sound of the coils' discharges. I use electric guitar pickups to capture the sound of the coils' electrical activity. What comes out of my loudspeakers is quite unpredictable, and this is what places the piece at the heart of transdisciplinarity: sound, light and electronics. In fact, I don't call it a concert, but a proposition. A proposition in which I show the manifestation of electrical energy in action: it's as visual as it is musical. I strive to propose indisciplinary pieces.
Des éclairs premiered in September 2020 at the "Musique Action" festival in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy.
DES ECLAIRS / Short from Herve Birolini on Vimeo.
Your experimentation with electricity led you to Tesla, a new piece that will premiere at L'Arsenal de Metz in January 2022...
This time, I wanted to add text, but using it as a musical instrument. Tesla is a staged musical performance for four hands, composed with François Donato. The piece is inspired by Nikola Tesla, an electrical genius born in 1856 in the Austrian Empire, who died in New York in 1943. Nikola Tesla devoted his life to imagining the many faces of electricity. A genius inventor and engineer, he saw the extraordinary capabilities that humanity could expect from this energy, but somehow got a little lost along the way, in the infinite maze of possibilities. Rather than evoking Tesla's life, the text I commissioned from Dominique Petitgand draws on the lexical field of electricity and the laboratory: "lightning", "hertz", "bakelite", "alternating magnetic fields", "distortion", "optics", "weightable matter"... I want to bring to the surface some of the notions that were part of the daily life of this inventor of genius, to plunge poetically into what might have been his thoughts. We'll be using a field of 16 omnidirectional loudspeakers, spread around the stage, and a few discreet lights to guide the ear. The text, read by an actor, has been recorded. It is considered on an equal footing with the instrumental fragments required of an instrumentalist in the studio.
At the moment, I'm in residency and developing a device of sixteen small Tesla coils that will produce fist-sized electric arcs above each of the loudspeakers. The energy will create a visual and aural experience: the field of the arc and the song of the coil.
Tesla Teaser Step #1 from Herve Birolini on Vimeo.
Since January, you've been the new president of a platform that will soon bring together a number of artists and creative music players in the Grand Est region...
The idea for dates back to 2015: it was an initiative by musicians and creators in Lorraine, who saw the arrival of the Greater Region and wanted to get together, create a network so as not to be lost in this future Grand Est ensemble. The Plateforme des musiques créations Grand Est, PFMC, now has 70 members: composers, improvisers, instrumentalists, ensembles, venues and festivals, and reflects the artistic diversity of the Grand Est region. The network is currently the only structured regional network for creative music in France. The network aims to bring together all contemporary music creation professionals in the Grand Est region (Scènes Nationales, Centre National de Création Musicale, Operas and other venues, whether or not they have an agreement with the region), and to weave exchanges with our cross-border neighbors. We'll be launching our platform by the end of 2021, and we'd like to initiate a number of events, including a cross-border professional meeting between France and Germany in 2022-2023, with concerts and the restitution of stages of work so that artists can meet with distribution professionals. Stay tuned!
Interview by Suzanne Gervais
