There’s no reason to resist and there’s no reason to stop. It’s an eternal dissolution. Everything good shall pass. Everything bad shall pass.
And finally, it doesn’t mean anything at all: it’s just a noise. But it isn’t just a noise, you see…
A voyage through sound and light written with the /nu/thing collective, in collaboration with ExperiensS, for the reopening of IRCAM Espace de Projection.
A wild run, through a curtain of droplets, through the quicksand of a relenting slowing down that leads nowhere, and if anything gets increasingly feverish – across gardens, cities, suburbs, drought, frost, flood, fire. Everything sinks, everything rises. The storm is on the horizon; it’ll come.
A crossing of five Bach’s secular cantatas, for piano and electronics, attempting to come out lighter and transfigured.
You are on the top of a hill, a path is before you. Far away, in the distance, a white cube with shadows dancing within it. Walk downhill, approach the white box.
The music of a carillon doesn’t reach us like words of a book or sounds of a concert, it reaches us like wind and rain.
A dream-like passacaglia, with a simple refrain and an everchanging background that organizes the world by pitch, so that we can either tune it, or perhaps tune ourselves through it.
An immersive journey in a novel that crosses the fates of men and women who came to California to participate in the construction of a gigantic suspension bridge.
With the complicity of Schubert, “Fathers” is both a concert piece and a documentary on ‘auditory fatherhood’, containing a set of interviews to composers and friends.
A short, entangled hommage to Chopin and Grisey, for piccolo, soprano sax and piano.
Dedicated to the Ensemble Imaginaire, for their first ten years.
A collaboration with Boris Labbé, crossing two conceptions: that of the windowed image-world and that of the image-sensitive closed on itself, through a multi-channel video installation, realized in digital animation.
Rewinding the film, the voice of Alan Watts: you can see yourself as existing only now, that’s the only “you” there is. The alternative to that, logically, is to see yourself as everything.
Four messages, rescued from oblivion or from white noise.
As celestial beings descend to Earth vitiating its population, the world’s order unbalances. Initiated by these terms, a tragic fall leads to the parturition of crucial opposites: Hell and Heaven’s circles.
How can a machine learn to produce music? A concept-album of generative music, a collection of musical monsters exploring sample-by-sample deep learning generative models, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and used in Jean François Peyret’s eponymous theatrical piece.
Concatenations, maps, paths, games, challenges. A work in progress and an attempt to write in the flesh of the world.
A /nu/thing project: the attempt for a truly collective writing
A trip to abstraction, as an hypothesis on how mountains may have formed.
True identity must be a collective one. Here’s an attempt of depersonalization of musical writing, in 269 (short) steps.
In random order: someone looking from the window of a train; an endless fall; the passage from contour to image; the passage from animation to film. Somehow an exploration of space an time, with no knowledge of where we are going. (“– so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation)
The An Experiment with Time installation “brought to life” by an (amplified and distorted) ensemble. Can installations become live events?
Come un lasciapassare talks about the passage from an acoustic to an electroacoustic world. In counterpoint, Shakespeare’s 123th sonnet: “No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change”
Speech becomes sensation, mechanic, material, and a sonorous incarnation; a giant mouth treading along the invisible boundary between installation and live performance.
Could dreams contain references to both past and future? In what proportion? Dreams, cycles and the construction of a time-dilating machine, inspired by John Dunne’s “An Experiment with Time”.
Time is a scraping engine, and the piece is a loose attempt to put it in motion. Musicians are four old gramophones, constantly in phase, granulating some old stuff. During the journey: the on and off of the light in a grey hospital corridor. And a scent, as of october leaves, as of tempests.
Is there a perspective to understand our universe, in which time, space, ages are somehow less interesting parameters than a network of shared things across geography and history? Is there ever a chance for music to be not “mine” nor “yours”, but – in a very deep sense – “ours”?
Sortie, Docili maniere, Finché morte, Benché simili, Mentre gelide, Eccetto Vercurago. As truncated incipits of non-existing poems, these six short piano pieces explore the relationships between extremely simple mechanisms and groundless abysses.
The path from an absence to a presence is a totally absorbing experience, analogous to the one in acousmatic music: imagination is guided by an object, almost magical, which represents its source. Then we see something, and the seen objects become a horde, a tribe of loudspeakers learning how to speak.
A Middle Ages catapulted into a non-place of a deformed imagination, with strange and disturbing interactions between different dimensions that reach the threshold of Chaos. The ghastly and immobile vestiges of the medieval iconography are deformed, transformed and destroyed to finally sprout again. The meeting of three disproportionates human skulls, vanities, triggers perturbation up to chaos. Skeletons dance to announce a cycle of continual construction and deconstruction.
A wager: the orchestration of a purely electroacoustic piece. An attempt: the rapprochement of the electroacoustic and acoustic writing. A game: sounds become words, and words become meta-words, keeping, like a faint shadow, a more or less indelible trace of their previous meaning.
An anthology whose raw material are masterpieces of past and recent history of music (from Ockegem to Grisey). Belonging, universality, authenticity: put these concepts in a composer’s hand, and they’ll immediately clash against the hermetically sealed compartment of copyrights. Eventually, all music is meta-music.
Luz, ojos, mundo. Light, eyes, world. An intimate exploration of of proximity and distance, through the words of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer.
Four Chansons by Ockeghem, four lieder for cello or viola, piano and lo-fi electronic device: “L’autre d’antan”, “Presque transi”, “Ma bouche rit”, “Malor me bat”. Distant voices, still lives. Can we sing with someone else’s voice?
Always keeping Mahler’s eight symphony as a distant mirror, a small fragment from un unknown Schlussszene aus Faust.
A “consertum” and a “certamen”, over a magma of underlying scores. Far away, the tip of the iceberg: Tristan.
Electronic sounds are elsewhere, in an unknown land where laws of physics get tricky, in a non-place where everything suddenly becomes possible, where sounds become symbols, and where words and ideas are mingled with the heavy burden of their possible meanings, as phantoms of a young Pessoa, in an dreamlike view.
Loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop. Circularity, recursion, iteration. As Flann O’ Brien’s fictional De Selby inside its hell, going round and round. But what’s the relation between looping and grooving?
A playful attempt to give a semantic value to sounds, taking as starting idea the articulation of the chapters of Lewis Carroll’s “Through the looking glass”. And as soon as the sounds become words, the words lose their sense, and turn into meta-words, which hold, as a faint shadow, traveling towards the other side of the mirror, a trace of their previous meaning.
Ecume deals with melancholy, as impossibility to come to terms with loss, an everlasting hope, yet constantly deceived.
A desperate cry for help, the frantic monologue of Bernard Marie Koltès in a chamber opera for an actor, two singers, ensemble and electronics.
“How can you read at present? Night is falling.” – an epiphany, a nocturne. Roxanne rewinds all the previous events and reads them from a new point of view. Everything changes, but it is too late.
Nietsche, Marinetti, Savinio, Bellezza, Joyce, Apollinaire: each one weaves the net for a criticism of Italian Futurist movement. Just outside the door: telephones, fireworks, megaphones. And right below the surface, between objects and shadows, the reflection of an hommage.
“So that there is no sun and no unveiling / and no host / only I and then the sheet / and bulk dead”
A clarinet player and a narrator face to face in an intimate and passionate journey towards Maurizio Cucchi’s unknown lands and marvelous towns.
