The Unraveling (pour FOCUS GRM) 2024

The Unraveling is a multichannel electroacoustic composition, which continues my exploration of disappearance and sound / compositional degradation. My approach is rather poetic and speculative; I do not use any real physical, analog or digital degradation procedure of the sound medium. It is a sequel to my 2022 album on Room40 ‘Deafened By The Noise Of Time’, which uses instrument recordings mixed with synthesized sounds, digital programming, as well as field recordings.

You can hear the entire concert here.

For The Unraveling, the primary sound material comes from instrument recordings done at home, on the fly, following a graphic score that invites performers to start from a tonal and repetitive musical idea and then slide discreetly towards arrhythmia, inharmony, extended techniques and / or silence. The proposed graphic score is made in an open way; the moments and means of capture will be variable and not very technical. The idea is therefore to desacralize this moment of recording and to recover living, variant sound materials, containing microphone movements, ‘errors’, voices… all these noises considered as ‘parasites’, but which also give subtle clues of place, people, environment, … the context of the moment and place of a sound, which defines and subtly modifies it. And it is notably on this principle of the ambiance of a sound that I wish to reflect on the spatial arrangement in the acousmonium of the GRM.

For my part, I will prepared several interpretations of this same score in advance, using a mixture of digital (code / Max) and analog (Serge + Eurorack) sound synthesis techniques which served as a minimal harmonic support, but also as a source of noise and subtle interference of the
acoustic instruments. A set of passive and active field recordings (intervening on the physical materials) help distance the composition from its very ‘musical’ beginning by reinforcing the possible interferences made at the time of recording the instruments, making them disappear gently under layers of sound sedimentation.

Finally, the mixing and editing process allowed a homogeneous convergence of these varied sources, maintaining the main idea throughout: the literal ‘denouement’, not in the theatrical sense, but rather the deconstruction, like a fabric that unravels. It is a piece like all things that evolve over time: an inexorable and continual slide towards a growing entropy, where complex but ephemeral constructions gradually lose their contexts and their meanings, dislocating and fading before disappearing into the background noise.

Many thanks to the friends that took the time to record their interpretation of this score for me to use as the foundation of the final work:

Louis Laurain – Trompette

Pierre Borel – Saxophone

Joao Tiago Dias (+João da Graça)  – Vibraphone, Objets

Félicie Bazélaire – Violoncelle 

Benjamin Dousteyssier – Saxophone Bariton

Sébastien Beliah – Contrebasse

Violetta Motta – Traverso

Rodolphe Loubatière – Caisse Claire + Objets

Sandra Weiss – Basson

Anna-Kaisa Meklin – Viole de Gambe

d’incise – Shakuachi

José Alberto Gomes – Melodica