Here is a work straddling a false field-recording and synthetic sounds.
LowFi? Poetic? Naive?
The following lines try to give some clues to understanding this work.
It took me a long time, many years, before all the components of this project, sound as well as visual and material choices, were put in place and finally became obvious. And yet, I still cannot understand all the reasons for this.
It's a strange feeling to be in front of a job, your own or of another, and to say "yes, that's it, it can only be that and not otherwise".
Oh certainly, it is not for me to claim to have done a "master piece", but only to note that the result corresponds to me, that it is not the result of an uncontrolled chance but is indeed a creation of my mind. Whatever its qualities and defects.
One can always look for the reasons for this feeling in a rational analysis: the construction logics, the coherence of the project, the quality of the making, the references. But that doesn't explain everything, far from it.
Indeed, as an artist, it is always difficult to understand all the reasons for his choices. And it is only a posteriori that all or part of the mechanics is revealed. And that to our surprise we can only note all these links that have been woven without the knowledge of our conscience during all these long years of hesitations and errors.
however, the problem seems simple:
On the one hand, there is a machine, a synthesizer, whose construction had exhausted me so much that once in a state of service, it disgusted me to the point that it remained unused for many years: frustrating situation.
On the other hand, the pleasure of concrete sounds, of this « Acousmatic listening » (« Ecoute réduite » in french) dear to Schaeffer whose simple and daily practice remains an inexhaustible wonder and pleasure.
And in between, this irresistible attraction to synthetic sounds that is why I make music.
And again, next to it, but present in me long before music, this practice of the image through drawing. A practice that until recently seemed difficult to associate with my sound universe.
I don't know how to properly define my work on this vinyl series, or what musical current to associate it with (and to be honest, I didn't even try to find out if in the plethora of electronic production, I had direct precursors).
Electroacoustic / Acousmatic music? Maybe so. In any case it is to the ideas and achievements of this current to which I feel the closest. I had in mind the gap between field-recording and modular synth performances that have become quite fashionable, by diverting the first one by a recreation of a natural space; and by proposing a sound color and a construction different from what is usually done in the world of synthetic music.
A posteriori, it's a color that seems to me closer to Noise, LowFi and other « Bruitiste » currents as well as everything related to "Do It Yourself". This last idea seems to me all the more relevant as the desire to do as much as possible by myself is also at the base of the project: handmade audio machine, handmade linocut, etc.
However, these associations with musical currents, which in the end I know in part rather badly, are not intended. But it's a sound color that is fully assumed. And if this color is so special, it is first of all due to the way of using these machines and not to the desire to graft myself to a style.
The goal was primarily to limit the tools. To focus on aesthetics, the "artistic" in the broad sense, and not on technique. Know some tools enough to forget them and let your fingers work according to what the ears dictate without the passage of an irrelevant technical reflection.
I can't find other explicit references, there are certainly many others, but my goal is not to justify my work with references, at most to give some leads to what led me to my achievements.
An important point of my work lies in a voluntary fragility, a voluntary imperfection of the construction as of the simulation of the natural. A naivety even, in the desire to recreate this natural space in a synthetic way. These notions have always seemed fertile to me because they involve voluntarily welcoming accidents and defects, staging them and playing with them to go beyond the original. This makes it possible to assume some birdsong with a much too synthetic color, very electronic backgrounds, etc. To return to the defects, I even enjoyed rebuilding them. For example, include crackles reminiscent of those of a microphone with defective connectivity.
In any case, it is a question of doing art, and not of offering a simulacrum of reality. This implies playing with the medium and expectations of listening and certainly not offering a technically irreproachable object but cold and without humanity.
It's a strange feeling to be in front of a job, your own or of another, and to say "yes, that's it, it can only be that and not otherwise".
Oh certainly, it is not for me to claim to have done a "master piece", but only to note that the result corresponds to me, that it is not the result of an uncontrolled chance but is indeed a creation of my mind. Whatever its qualities and defects.
One can always look for the reasons for this feeling in a rational analysis: the construction logics, the coherence of the project, the quality of the making, the references. But that doesn't explain everything, far from it.
Indeed, as an artist, it is always difficult to understand all the reasons for his choices. And it is only a posteriori that all or part of the mechanics is revealed. And that to our surprise we can only note all these links that have been woven without the knowledge of our conscience during all these long years of hesitations and errors.
however, the problem seems simple:
On the one hand, there is a machine, a synthesizer, whose construction had exhausted me so much that once in a state of service, it disgusted me to the point that it remained unused for many years: frustrating situation.
On the other hand, the pleasure of concrete sounds, of this « Acousmatic listening » (« Ecoute réduite » in french) dear to Schaeffer whose simple and daily practice remains an inexhaustible wonder and pleasure.
And in between, this irresistible attraction to synthetic sounds that is why I make music.
And again, next to it, but present in me long before music, this practice of the image through drawing. A practice that until recently seemed difficult to associate with my sound universe.
I don't know how to properly define my work on this vinyl series, or what musical current to associate it with (and to be honest, I didn't even try to find out if in the plethora of electronic production, I had direct precursors).
Electroacoustic / Acousmatic music? Maybe so. In any case it is to the ideas and achievements of this current to which I feel the closest. I had in mind the gap between field-recording and modular synth performances that have become quite fashionable, by diverting the first one by a recreation of a natural space; and by proposing a sound color and a construction different from what is usually done in the world of synthetic music.
A posteriori, it's a color that seems to me closer to Noise, LowFi and other « Bruitiste » currents as well as everything related to "Do It Yourself". This last idea seems to me all the more relevant as the desire to do as much as possible by myself is also at the base of the project: handmade audio machine, handmade linocut, etc.
However, these associations with musical currents, which in the end I know in part rather badly, are not intended. But it's a sound color that is fully assumed. And if this color is so special, it is first of all due to the way of using these machines and not to the desire to graft myself to a style.
The goal was primarily to limit the tools. To focus on aesthetics, the "artistic" in the broad sense, and not on technique. Know some tools enough to forget them and let your fingers work according to what the ears dictate without the passage of an irrelevant technical reflection.
The duration, 4'33, requires some explanation. Or rather allows to reveal some references.
Contrary to what one might think, this duration was chosen because it is very suitable for engraving on a 45T side (did John Cage choose this duration for the same reasons !?). But then the reference to Cage is just a nice wink. And no reference to his work or ideas can be associated with my own work because I don't know him enough for that. All the same, the idea of "composing", or at least putting forward, which usually constitutes an ignored background sound seems an obvious echo of his concerns. Another logical reference could be Luc Ferrari, with his "Presque Rien". But I had in mind the name of Eric La Casa, especially his series "The Stones of the Threshold", whose listening had greatly impressed me. And another artist, Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace) who was certainly more decisive on my vinyl series because he often reworks and recomposes his recordings drastically, not hesitating to blur the tracks on the nature of the final result. A process that had freed up my musical practice a lot.I can't find other explicit references, there are certainly many others, but my goal is not to justify my work with references, at most to give some leads to what led me to my achievements.
An important point of my work lies in a voluntary fragility, a voluntary imperfection of the construction as of the simulation of the natural. A naivety even, in the desire to recreate this natural space in a synthetic way. These notions have always seemed fertile to me because they involve voluntarily welcoming accidents and defects, staging them and playing with them to go beyond the original. This makes it possible to assume some birdsong with a much too synthetic color, very electronic backgrounds, etc. To return to the defects, I even enjoyed rebuilding them. For example, include crackles reminiscent of those of a microphone with defective connectivity.
In any case, it is a question of doing art, and not of offering a simulacrum of reality. This implies playing with the medium and expectations of listening and certainly not offering a technically irreproachable object but cold and without humanity.
It is obvious that a "natural" sound space is not built in its temporal evolution as is a "classical" score. The rules of arrangement of sounds (instruments?) are here obsolete: no sonata form, no rondo. No ideas of fugues, series, chord grids or other. At most, we can imagine a scenario. And again, the examples of La Casa or Kwi invited me to go further than the realization of what would basically be "program music".
First of all, it should be noted that the use of the synthesizer to build all the sounds of a "natural" environment implies having to think about the physical consequences that support this natural space. When it comes to recreating a realistic environment in computer graphics, it is necessary, for example, to recreate the gravity and solidity of "objects". The idea here is essentially the same: to give a certain "credibility" to synthetic spaces, I had to recreate everything. It is an interesting work that requires listening to "everything" in the sound that we perceive. I admit to having worked without having formalized my constructions. The questions being asked, the construction was made with these questions in mind. This implies not choosing a scenario or diverting it. And similarly, to have a concern for coherence and credibility of the sound space created while twisting this space a little so that a doubt settles on the nature of what is listened to. In short, to compose in all conscience the problems posed by my project.
This is important to me. It is also for this reason that I did not directly copy realistic sounds but did everything from memory.
Like a painter who creates a landscape in his studio, after having made a trip. And especially does not use his sketches or photographs but only what he has kept from his travel impressions.
Another important point, I do not want to hide the medium: it was made with a synthesizer, only. And I don't want to hide the source. Likewise I do not want to hide all the work of editing this sound source: I voluntarily added the audible cuts, included evident synthetic sounds. I want us to be able to hear that it was a machine that produced the sounds, and that there is a human behind these machines. To use the analogy with the painter: I do not want to hide the "brushstrokes". Nor hide that the painting is not a "window on a landscape", but of the material deposited on a canvas stretched on a frame.
We can therefore understand these "synthetic sound spaces" as the recreation of a nature of which only the distant, imperfect and distorted memory remains; who assumes his artificial origin.
The series.
I like the idea of the series: It allows you to reiterate a reflection on the same problem and thus refine your reasoning. And for the listener to enter deeper into the artist's universe.A series also makes it possible to keep coherence over a longer period of time, at an additional level of reflection: not on a work, but on a group of works.
It is planned a series of 9 vinyls. 18 pieces of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Each cover is a part that, once all assembled, will reconstitute the image of a tree. Each cover follows to gradually form, as the vinyls come out, the complete picture. Each cover is of an identical format, as is the duration of each song.
This allows me to quickly speak about the visual part of this series.
Each vinyl is associated with an image. This image is a hand-printed linocut (literally: without a press machine). With its deliberate defects, and often its traces of ink on the back.
30 of the 300 vinyls are offered with an original linocut.
It is not necessary to go back on the aesthetic choices because they are identical to those made for the sound: naivety assumed, the branches are very stereotypical, voluntarily flat without real depth in the image. It is not a "real" tree that is represented, but an idea, a tree memory. The medium is not hidden either, nor are the defects in the making.
A few words about the technique:
The only sound source comes from a modular synthesizer built more than 15 years ago. And no other source, even hidden, is used. For example, there was no recording of animals or field recording that I would have patiently reconstructed on top of it, and then deleted the original.
The editing was done in an audio editing software (Reaper) that I used as simply as possible: I only allowed myself the cutting, the modification of the volume and panning, and the layering of the audio files. There is therefore no addition of effects, or treatments (equalization, compression ...) during the mixing step.To be completely exhaustive, I allowed myself the cleaning of some tracks that sometimes suffer from a "hum" (50Hz). And finally, a slight "mastering" was necessary for a good adaptation to the target medium: vinyl.
What there would be to say about these De Secretis Naturae is not closed, far from it, especially since the series is only at its 4th element. I hope at least that these few lines will lead to a better understanding of my work.
The Vinyls: https://raphaelpanis.bandcamp.com/
For the sonic part: http://www.rpanis-akousma.fr/
For the visual part: http://www.rpanis-anthropos.fr/
Some video of the use of the synthesizer:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChfTv9y_1G1o6icBdval2gg
For the sonic part: http://www.rpanis-akousma.fr/
For the visual part: http://www.rpanis-anthropos.fr/
Some video of the use of the synthesizer:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChfTv9y_1G1o6icBdval2gg