creation : 30.03.2016, MSH Paris Nord – Université Paris 8 (France)
duration : 13′
musicians : 6 percussionists
Over there, here
This piece offers the musical version of a letter. The one Hans addresses to Sophie, freely inspired by the literary work Petits Fantômes Mélancoliques: Contes autistes by Quebec author Louise Bombardier. Hans does the “dysfunctional” and waits “here, in his country” while Sophie “who never bends” lives in the windowsills. Miles away, they both watch the rain falling outside, whose strange musicality makes their imaginations wander.
The work explores the rhythmic and timbral correspondences between the whispered voice, the percussion playing and the electroacoustic part. It seeks to highlight areas of ambiguity between real and virtual sources. The instrumental play is articulated between wandering and systematism, as an illustration respectively of the dreams and obsessive troubles of the two characters. The real-time treatment poses itself as a metaphor for the autistic’s perceptive extension, that is, those things that exist, that they perceive, but that we are unable to see. Finally, the voice is treated as a wind and percussion instrument: snippets of phrases are used to create games with the formants, and mouth noises generate a kind of human beatbox that counteracts the percussion.