Drop out presents the music composed by Vincent Malassis for the short film of the same name by Hoël Duret. Faithful to his sound aesthetics, the musician proposes soaring and bewitching electronic textures, with a great care given to the different atmospheres and their evolution.

In this opus, the music must accompany and dialogue in counterpoint with the image and the filmic rhythm. The necessarily timed sequences of the film, the multiple changes of atmosphere due to the frequent cuts, and the adequacy to the graphic and poetic universe of the director imply another form of temporality, concretized here by short pieces in the form of sound mosaic.

Having listened to the album before discovering the film, we can affirm that the world opened by the record is sufficiently coherent and dreamlike to be able to do without the image, whether it is for example on the hypnotic loops of the introductory track "Only One Palm" and its concluding mirror "Doubtful Sound" or in the grandiose deployment of the three buildings of "Tongariro", sound cathedrals based on the organic effects of analogical synthesis, present on the whole record. However, the music takes on its full meaning with the film, in which the two artistic languages mutually enrich each other, in a perfect symbiosis. The collaboration was built from a distance, whileHoël Duret was in New Zealand to make a film about the current ecological crisis. He had complete confidence in the musician, who was given carte blanche for the compositions. With the health crisis of spring 2020, the project evolved, making more urgent the anguishing questionings on the ultra-technologisation of the current world and the generalized ultra-communication on the internet, which juggle between depth and extreme futility, and where finally nothing means much anymore.

Among the multiple sequences that follow one another in the short film, like the clicks of a mouse surfing from link to link, we frequently come back to the image of a teeming forest. It is reduced to a simple role of background screen in front of which digital avatars in the shape of wild animals discuss very diverse and completely obsolete subjects, animals in the process of disappearing or regularly hunted, moreover (owl, fox, eagle, lion and bear). It is this world of incomprehensible and illogical simulacra that the film reveals in many other passages. Vincent Malassis admits that the musical theme that accompanies this sequence, declined in several variations, "To be here is a splendor", was for him the most difficult to realize, because he wished it " contrasted, fresher, almost happy, composed in major for the first time ", that is to say quite far from his usual universe. The music thus perfectly underlines the vain character of these exchanges, in front of the urgency of the crisis which humanity should face.

In the film, the only moments when the music takes a back seat, or even interrupts, are to make room for the fragmented words of two young students, who present the ideal to be reached of a saving return to nature, reassuring, optimistic, but which everything seems to want to prevent. For the rest, the universes are in constant struggle: the film of a moth is plastered on a technical text that we can no longer read, a fake jungle is reconstituted in an interior with watering and artificial lights, Mount Tongariro is invaded by digital objects that are not very reassuring, a container ship waiting in a port opposes shots of natural landscapes saturated and irradiated with light, as if on borrowed time, up to the point of extreme distortion by digital filtering at the end of the film. Only Vincent Malassis' music, a falsely soothing sound tapestry, provides a link in this incomprehensible world.

At the beginning of Werner Herzog'sAguire or the Wrath of the Gods (1972), the music of Popol Vuh accompanied the caravan of conquistadors entering the jungle in search of El Dorado, doomed to failure, condemned to be swallowed by the forest. Here, it is the natural world that seems to be definitively annihilated by the action of men, on a music just as soaring, underlining the gravity of the moment. In the middle of the film, Hoël Duret asks the students this worried question: "Are you all right, shall we continue? »

Guillaume Kosmicki

Music - Vincent Malassis, Alkyle Records, 2020