SUBSTRAT: A subtractive performance by Flore & Arandel
Let’s imagine the music has already started. The music, the sound, the noise.
Let’s imagine an audience, doomed to be late to the party. An audience arrived after the start, that they can only imagine, invited to witness the disappearance of the music, its erasure, its eclipse.
What does the audience discover, when it arrives in the venue, without having been able to witness the gesture that produced the sound, the first, original gesture through which the music comes? Which type of concerts does the audience attend when the ritual is shaken up, when the ceremony is reversed? And above all, how can the sound be listened to, when the audience missed its origination, but knows that it is there to witness the process of its inevitable disappearance?
It is an inverted ceremony because deep down, what role do musicians play when instead of building, piling up layers, harmonizing notes, they do exactly the opposite? When they decompose instead of composing. When, instead of making music, they undo it. When they hollow out, when they strip down, when they erase the sound. When their work as a musician is more that of a sculptor who carves into the material to reveal the form. When they reach the end of this counterpoint process to unveil the shape of silence.
When the audience enters the venue, a guitar is already playing on its own standing in front of an amp, self-feeding a saturated drone with its own feedback.
At some point, the lights suddenly go off. And in a blinding light, the PA is opened.
In the speakers and in pitch dark, the feedback of the amplified guitar is processed through machines, the signal sent to modular synths, saturated by effects pedals, treated through various tape delays and long reverberations.
It is then and only then that the musicians enter the stage. For 50 minutes, they will undo the music, erase the pile of sounds. By modelling this material, gradually scooping out this complex sonic body, they will progressively make sequences of melody appear, they will reveal rhythmic patterns and other harmonics previously buried under the thickness of the drone.
As the sound fades out and as white smoke appears and pours on everything, the light returns conversely, very gradually and uniformly in this cloudy mass. Eventually, even the feedback dies out in this luminous white magma.
Silence has been made.
It is deafening.
ARANDEL gravitates in the electronic universe and many of its satellites, creating projects with varied aesthetics, with the search for new identities and unexpected and successful sound encounters in line of sight, always. He plays music and with music, and he plays with his voice, self-taught in all trades and master of none, yet it is exciting to hear him grasp a theme, and shape it according to his endless imagination.
Author of 6 EPs and 5 albums released on the French label InFiné and an EP on the Sheffield label Computer Club (Central Processing Unit’s sub-label), he also created many sound pieces for museums and places as varied as the Quai Branly, la Gaîté lyrique, the Musée de la Musique in Paris, Grandes Serres du Parc de la Tête d’Or in Lyon, the cultural centre in Ambronay and its baroque music festival… Passionate about soundtracking, he created two cinemixes, one for Gaumont’s 120th anniversary, on excerpts from the movie ‘Les Vampires’ by Louis Feuillade and the other at the invitation of the Cinémathèque Française, accompanied by pianist Edouard Ferlet, for th opening of a Murnau retrospective. Arandel is also a fine designer for tracks, an inspired assembler who makes pieces from different eras, texts, sounds, noises, ghosts communicate, with a certain magic… As in his series of themed mixtapes: around French fashion in the 60’s, sonic architecture, Halloween or Christmas.
Arandel played with classical musicians, foley artists, choirs, dancers, visual artists and more: guests from all backgrounds.
His latest sound odyssey? Reinterpretations of Bach, with the aim of “demonstrating that, if Bach had lived in the twentieth century, he, too, would have been demonstrator for Moog”.
On the live side, Arandel’s imaginary worlds led him to stop over in great places, answering diverse invitations, from the Design Museum in Miami to the Universal Exhibition in Shanghai. Arandel played numerous mythical festivals: Nuits de Fourvière in Lyon, Days Off in Paris, Printemps de Bourges, Nuits Sonores in Lyon or Sonar in Barcelona.
Driven by curiosity and her passion for technologies, FLORE has built her musical journey guided by risk and generous creativity. If her musical roots go back to Jamaican sound systems and broken sounds made in the UK, her musical culture and tastes cover a wider territory that goes from Animal Collective to Konono N*1, not forgetting film soundtracks. Flore is also the boss of POLAAR, one of the most exciting music labels of recent years in France.
Lights: For several years, JULIEN APPERT has been creating solo audio-visual performances in which he works on the relationship between live music and images: Arthur H at Châtelet, Toh Imago for Arte to name but a few.
Booking pascal@julietippex.com