Circulations

opis:
Editor's info:
The 2nd CD of the french musician Pierre-Yves Macé (following Faux-Jumeaux released on Tzadik) pushs faraway the limits of contemporary and electronic music. He developed the auto-sampling process around the concept of the double or replica, creating correspondances between the instrumental part solist (percussion, electric guitar, harp, clarinet) and his electroacoustic futur.
Following Faux-Jumeaux, where I developed the auto-sampling process (composing a piece of music using only samples of the instruments appearing in that piece of music) around the concept of the double or replica, I chose with Circulations to push the same method much further by approaching it from a more pragmatic angle. Its composition, developed in residency at Euphonia/Grenouille, went through 4 separate stages:
* before the residency, I first wrote - in the traditional sense and with a certain level of indeterminacy - 4 movements for solo instruments, having only a vague idea of their possible correspondences.
* upon my arrival at the location of the residency, we rehearsed the four solos and I recorded them immediately.
* then, the work consisted of using these recordings as the source material for the composition of an electroacoustic accompaniment for each initial solo.
* afterwards, the musicians rehearsed their solos (which, in the meantime and following Step 3, had undergone some changes) and tailored it to the tape part.
Therefore, the performance falls halfway between mixed concert music (referenced by the instrument + tape device) and live electronics (judging from the 'indexed' relation between electronics and instrument). Even though the musicians never actually play together, they are nonetheless virtually brought together by the presence of the tape, which blends and fuses their instrumental sounds as a whole. By putting side by side in a near-didactical way several compositional stages, two types of writings ('abstract' and 'concrete'), this process invites from the listener a cross-reading of the work, matching each instrumental part to its electronic evolution: a sequence of vibraphone arpeggios elsewhere becomes a click'n'cut gimmick, a guitar melody transforms into an ambient loop, and a sustained note on the bass clarinet gives birth to a rumbling in the subfrequency range. So many potentialities comprised in the abstractly written material, but also in the accidents of its recording, its 'mise en son.'
If this correspondence is not entirely rigorous, it is to leave enough room for the endlessly stretchable feedback interplay - or circulation - between abstract and concrete. This album represents one moment in the mutation generated by this movement. Pierre-Yves Macé