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Elsa Biston's "Prendre corps", presented on 12 November at the Théâtre de Vanves, starts out as a sonic immersion, only to quickly grab our senses and consciousness like a mysterious ritual.
Cushions laid out on the floor of the Panopée, a forest of photogenic objects, incredibly beautiful in their simplicity, their nakedness (one thinks of Dubuffet), connected to transducers (loudspeakers), themselves connected, one suspects, to a computer system... and the composer, in the middle of this device, sitting behind her computer, and who, like a demiurge, stimulates this orchestra of objects with a torrent of sounds that emerges under her fingers.
So much for the tangible, the world of appearances.
And since the visual part of "Taking shape " is essential, let's go all the way to the description.
The forest of objects is in fact an addition of small clearings, of "choirs", the composer tells us. For my part, I like the image of the forest and the plants, because each object is fixed on a sloping metal rod which one imagines could sway like a flower in the wind: here a choir of sculpted or perforated sheets of paper, there a group of boxes, cans, metal plates, an ensemble of drums...
These objects, from the very first moment, not only attract our attention but also "speak" to us. They seem to be endowed with speech, a new speech, a form of dream language, with blurred contours, a "rustling of the tongue" rather than a language. It is because the sounds, sent by the composer from her computer keyboard, set these objects in vibration, make them "take shape", thus "animating" them. These objects have become figures, characters who keep us company. They do even more than that: by vibrating, by "speaking", they awaken in us buried stories, forgotten worlds.
At the beginning, the eye is so taken up by the beauty of the objects, the play of light and vibration, that the ear follows the eye, lagging a little behind... Little by little, however, the eye gives way: the character-objects become so familiar to us in their physical characteristics, their materiality, their ability to vibrate, to murmur, to hum, that they become a part of us. We are all ears!
We then forget the demiurge - the composer - in the same way that in Bunraku the spectator, caught up in the action, gradually forgets the hands of the puppeteers, who operate the fascinating silhouettes of the characters, promised to singular destinies. We enter into the music, or rather into the textures, the interplay of planes that this polymorphous, dense music draws, which seems to have neither beginning nor end, a sort of musical daydream, punctuated however by a few reminders of motifs, sounds, vibrations, which we have the impression of recognising but which each time evade our memory, as if a spell had taken possession of them, because yes, "Taking body" has a "sorcerer's" side!
"Wizard" in the way it weaves together the natural, the animal (bird songs), the musical (orchestral sounds, voice sounds, snatches of songs), and the synthetic sounds... "Wizard" also in the ghostly appearances of the two clarinettists Julien Pontvianne and Antonin-Tri Hoang, who from time to time move around the concert space to mix their sounds with those of the animated objects.
At the end of "Prendre corps", we are not quite the same: our eyes search for the silent character-objects, while our whole being vibrates, from head to toe.
" Prendre corps " certainly takes us far away, and draws a sonic "cartography" like no other!
For more information on 'Taking Body', an open discussion with Elsa Biston.
Anne Montaron: When we enter the auditorium, our eyes are immediately drawn to the objects attached to your rods and connected to loudspeakers: there are about twenty of them, divided into five or six groups that I think you call choirs?
Elsa Biston: Yes, because they can evoke characters; they have been personified. Characters that are sometimes humans, sometimes animals, sometimes natural elements. I wanted this arrangement that groups them by family and allows the journey from the natural element to the personification.
You talk about personification ... indeed, we perceive voices, different types of voices.
Yes, we have the feeling that these objects speak to us. I worked on the voices beforehand. There are two types of phenomenon. I'm thinking, for example, of the rusty box with chickpeas inside, which vibrate and zing. When we broadcast a voice recorded, let's say, "cleanly", it sounds like it's coming out of an old transistor.
Other times, I treat them in such a way that it sounds like it's the object that's emitting the voice. Like the big golden can, with its low, brassy resonance that emits a kind of growl.
So either the voice is filtered upstream, so that only that component remains, or the transformation starts from an animal's cry, or from a simple sinus, to which I have given an inflection. And it all blends together. You can't identify the origin of the sounds, and you get the impression that it's the object that's talking.
Can you tell us about the sounds you send into the objects?
I send out different kinds of sounds: pure frequencies, lots of sine waves that make beats and, sometimes, some kind of rhythm, and all kinds of sound and vocal material. It's all composed. There is a very precise timeline. That's the first layer of music. The only thing that is not "composed" are the interventions of the clarinets, which sometimes fluctuate. Each sound is worked for and with the object that broadcasts it.
It's a whole, a weaving: a sound for an object.
Does the intervention of the objects follow a well-defined scenario?
Yes. However, the sounds change a lot when they are broadcast. I still have a lot of layers to mix in situ, because they are handmade objects, not reliable instruments.
I give the example of the cardboard with its little chainmail that rubs when you send a vibration: it makes very noisy sounds. If we send sounds at a low volume into this cardboard, it only sounds if I pass a certain threshold. In the case of the can, if I pass a certain threshold on a given frequency, it will resonate and fill the whole room.
So there are a lot of uncertainties, depending on the size of the room, the presence of the audience, the temperature. It's almost like improvisation!
The show lasts about an hour: does it unfold a form, a dramaturgy, or is it somewhere else?
The whole thing does not tell a story. I place myself in a place where one takes the time to enter into situations. I would like the listener to question his or her sensations and/or associations of ideas: " how is it that a can generates this type of memory, this type of image for me "... The relationship to the object is important. These sounds become characters and raise questions. It is an intermediary between acousmatic music (which is pure listening) and instrumental music (which is embodied). Here we are in between the two, so we ask ourselves questions about the nature of listening. In all types of music there are bodies - whether they are present or absent.
Why in this sense add two musicians who interact?
Probably to question this contrast and the distance between the two. Moreover, they are barely there, I wanted them to be almost ghostly: the minimum possible presence, and yet that changes everything! When I turn down the volume and they play only acoustically, it creates a gap... and that's important. I like their cyclical appearances. They also work a lot on the beats. They have mastered this beat. Their research is very fine, they work on the sound in a very subtle way.
What was the point of origin of this orchestra of objects?
The starting point was a duo I had with Benjamin Sanz, who is a jazz drummer. We were looking for a working angle and I had the idea of putting transducers on his drums. The drums made me want to work with rhythms. Hence the exploration of sine waves and beats. This produces rhythms, which seem recognisable, but as we are in the field of continuity, the contours of the rhythms are much more blurred, and things can wander. The device got bigger and I experimented with it on a lot of objects. I really feel like I've found my instrument, it's been a bit of a revelation!
You built all these objects and this device yourself. And the choir of metal plates?
I worked with an artist called Stéphane Perraud. With him, I developed the "installation" side of the project. It was he who had the idea of these plates. At the beginning I worked on cymbals, with a whole set of resonances. When you broadcast a voice into these plates, it places it in a large space. The voice I'm broadcasting inside is the voice of a resident of the Haut-Montreuil neighbourhood that I recorded for a job in the past and that sings me a lullaby for children; I'm happy to give her this space! (laughs). The solemnity that comes out of it enhances it, in a way.
The human factor also interferes here?
Yes, what interests me in the idea of " Taking Body " is the fact that the voices circulate or respond to each other between the different objects; it's like flows of ideas that become "bodies" in places or that float. These voices, these sounds, always remain blurred, so that the listener is aware of the part of activity that he or she has in the perception of things. It is the listener who constructs his own story, his own fictions. This is where my work is situated.
In my music in general, I want the listener to follow his own path. It's an Eliane Radigue or Alvin Lucierapproach... I try to be close to sound situations that can be landscapes, where there are many heterogeneous things that are superimposed. The ear will search, deconstruct.
I listened to Charles Ives recently: it's incredible how his approach goes beyond the discursive logic of Western music. He was the first to do this!
We are in a space that is "geographical" because we can explore it. This research allowed me to get away from the reflexes of musical forms. I loved this experience.
I realised one thing: music evolves all the time, but you don't have to have a discourse that goes from point A to point B... You can come back, go back, set up a cycle, and go through stages.
Article and comments collected by Anne Montaron
