The organized noise

les étincelles hurlantes

After my work on the “son des bols”, which was a little intimate, I had the opportunity to work here on a more sonorous material, which allows me to enrich my palette towards something more intense, sometimes more violent. And unlike ceramics, which only resonates once out of the oven, my friend Julien Allegre‘s sculptures already resonate in their raw state, even before the sheet metal is shaped and machined.

When I recorded him in his studio, I discovered that his works were born in a sparkle burst, with noises of twisting, hammering, grinding… That’s all that I tried to restore in this disc. I also find in his work an approach close to mine: he assembles, associates and juxtaposes various elements thanks to welding, as I do with audio editing.

His sculptures are the fruit of fire and fusion, but they can also have the appearance of tenderness or rest, which has also allowed me to design calmer tracks as the disc progresses. And then Julien being also a drummer-percussionist, he offered me his musical gesture in addition to the sounds from his work. And once again, my director friend Benoît Renard has transcended this new sound adventure with his magnificent images.

le son des bols

The first time I entered Mireille Favergeon‘s gallery, I had to resist the urge to have her bowls ring. Obviously, his ceramic universe reveals only part of his magic if you only admire it with your eyes. Having become friends over time, I spent a day at her house recording a large part of her pieces. This sound material brought back to my home, I discovered the richness (which I already suspected) of the instrumentarium that it beat as it was being cooked. Each piece, in addition to its size, shape and email, has a unique sound identity.

Then begins a long work consisting in classifying them into families: low, high, resonant, resonant, dry, pure… Then an observation: a ceramic is a percussive instrument, but which can continue to live in a magical way after being struck. Since music is based on the organization of sounds and time, all I had to do was marry these bowls, these vases, to compose the little “sound miniatures” that you hear while your eyes see.

Except for my guitar at a few moments (I had to associate my primary instrument with it), all the other sounds come from ceramics, most often left in their natural state, but sometimes deformed, diverted, as if to better penetrate the material that composes them. The images of director Benoît Renard illustrate this whole process.