Figures du son, chirurgie et puissance de la poussière

Un vrai visage de la musique doit autant son éclat à la surface lisse, polie, d'une forme qu'à l'embrasement matériel d'organes, de tissus et d'humeurs variées. Toute musique se dédie elle-même à ce qui lui ressemble. J'entends lui répondre des opérations imaginaires vouées à se joindre dans une sensation étrange : le cri de la poussière et une certaine chirurgie. Deux images oeuvre double de la peau et des organes qu'elle enveloppe. C'est comme si un visage émergeait, vestige et masque de pierre, d'une tempête de sable et que, à travers les fenêtres de bouche, narines, yeux, oreilles, des organes étonnaient par d'improbables opérations.
Que dire de transplantations organiques et vasculaires d'où résulterait un si étonnant mélange ? Initialement, greffe et pontage vasculaires segmentaux peuvent être autoplastiques (le segment de vaisseau transplanté est prélevé sur l'individu lui-même); homoplastiques (le prélèvement a lieu sur un autre individu); hétéroplastiques (prélevé sur un organisme d'une autre espèce). Considérons tel corps, tel visage recomposé de toutes ces façons de combinaisons. Un cri que l'on génère s'abouche à un crépitement électrique. Un premier cri est apponté à un second dans l'intervalle d'un soupir. Une corde vibrante coupe un cri interrompu, sans risque de rétrécissement ou d'oblitération de ces vaisseaux. Plus loin, les transplantations se développent, en suturant os, muscles, nerfs et peau. Quels bouleversements fonctionnels cela peut-il produire ? Pour le visage de musique dont on parle, l'oeil aspire et avale, la bouche entend... et l'oreille voit. Dans le bloc opératoire, sur la table d'opération est toujours maintenue la tension de tous ces actes.
Pétillements, bruissements, chuintements animaux. Affirmative chute dans le temps, dans l'horloge et dans la percussion... On croit entendre le cri de la poussière.
Du silence de la poussière cadavérique aux mille bruits du corps ouvert, l'attention chirurgienne procède du résidu au souffle, de la bave incolore à la bouche incarnat, de la larme à la vision... de la surdité à la claire écoute...
Elle enveloppe tout ce qui demeure sans mouvement. Et s'avoue-t-elle passe-muraille par les plus minces intervalles dans la pierre. La double puissance du linceul et de la volatilité définit la double qualité — la double intimité — de son cri.
La poussière parle, parce qu'une main a réveillé de la matière sa signature et — dirait Jakob Böhme — c'est l'instrument de la matière qui vibre.
La poussière sur la peau : fourmillement aérien des sons des profondeurs, résonances sur la table d'harmonie du coeur.
Le cri de la poussière exprime la vérité de ce qui apparaissait d'abord surface lisse, contour décidé d'une forme, d'un visage, et qui se révèle enfin crêtes dentelées, champ de plis innervés de copeaux transparents, pelotes et aiguilles fissibles, frêles ultimement... sédiments clandestins... scories inopportunes... Une oeuvre sauvage dutemps.
Voilà que les deux règnes premièrement incompatibles — de l'organicité composite et de la forme unitaire — composent l'empire du visage. Polyphonie et trait monodique y sont les deux hémifaces de la figure du son. Mais c'est que l'acte de chirurgie est complet, que le visage masque recomposé résonne que le son prend figure.

Olivier Capparos

The breakdown of amplification between input and output is a moment of anxiety: suddenly the clarity of the message is disturbed, splintered and made suspect, overshadowed by an unknown interference, a glitch of intention. Cast across the one-to-one equation of input to output, signal to message, word to definition, the shadow of the unknown unsettles the belief in technology and its ability to convey the message, to deliver up the appropriate output in response to input — to simply do the job.
Against the grain interference appears: from an unknown source, within the musculature of the body, inside vocal chords that strain to speak, to draw up the proper words, from inside the very instruments of culture. As a body one is punctured by interference, set off balance and plunged into chaos; however momentary, every chaos is cause for alarm, for the order it disrupts dies a reluctant death. In a sense, the conflicts of order and chaos occur as territorial challenges — between regions of meaning that always slip
against the tectonics of coherence and interference, along fault-lines of noise and silence, grating along the edges of harmony and discord.
Interference here is akin to a parasitic invasion: "para-site" being a space unto itself, a space occupied by an ill-defined entity, or the grotesque, for isn't the monstrous defined by its endless need to prey on the healthy, as an other who nonetheless craves to enter properly into the normal? Yet, the parasitic as a condition occurs as the very living with an alienpresence that is privately one's own — a personalized other constituted by the very stuff of one's body, for the parasitic feeds on the material already privately cultivated: in other words, the parasite is secretly what one desires. In this way, the parasitic as a pathological alternative is a kind of inverse of oneself, a haunting doppelganger that exists up close, as an underside to every gesture and impulse.
Interference too is up close, always on the border, in the wings, emerging inside the very fabric of musical production, infringing upon the wholesome perfection of proper recording, of a clean signal. It lashes out across thesonic spectrum, right at the instance of performance, inside the very movements of musical organization.
On the other side of this divide — this binary opposition between the normaland the pathological, the site and the para-site, clarity andinterference — is the experimental cultivation of the parasitic as a productive model, as a norm framed not by the antagonism of its other, the proper, but by anxiety itself, yet anxiety without its medicinal prescriptive, its remedy, but anxiety given free reign, as monarch of this region. This region here is a musical one, and the parasitic as that alternate site defined by sources that interfere and set reeling, thrust outward by the internal longing for the very disruption of things, the musical result being the opportunity to witness completely what may occur inside the space of interference.

Brandon Labelle

Tous ces sons, bruits et grains de matière, figurent selon les moments, selon l'humeur de l'écoutant aussi, autant de mondes souterrains, biologiques, internes, cosmiques ou même cosmétiques, ils évoquent tour à tour l'inquiétante palpitation du corps, le terrifiant grondement du magma, mais aussi bien la légèreté d'une aube, la transparence d'un éveil. Ces mêmes matériaux grainés fin, lorsqu'ils prennent la forme du continu, nous renvoient à la dialectique ancienne de Parménide et d'Héraclite, ou encore à l'opposition pascalienne entre l'infiniment grand et l'infiniment petit. Ils donnent sens alors à ce qui ne se présente d'abord que comme fruit du hasard, ou de la rencontre. Ce qui est totalement réussi dans cette séance en cinq parties, c'est la cohérence parfaite entre le piano, joué selon l'ensemble des "techniques" de l'improvisation contemporaine, et la fabrique industrielle des sons. Un disque où le sens de la forme est toujours en adéquation avec le contenu matériel.
Philippe Méziat l Jazz Magazine l Septembre 2002

Ne me demandez pas comment ils font. Je le devine à peine. L'écoute me fait penser au fameux groupe anglais AMM tant au point de vue du son que de l'esprit. Rien d'étonnant, Noettinger et Marchetti collaborent avec Keith Rowe, le guitariste d'AMM. L'électronique envahissant de plus en plus la scène de la musique créative ou aItemative (choisissez le terme qui vous convient), il me semble salutaire d'écouter les sons du tandem augmenté ici de la pianiste Sophie Agnel qui sollicite autant la table d'harmonie que les touches du clavier. La teneur en harmoniques y est une des plus élevées du secteur. Loin du "Iaptop", de la digitalité froide et du décibélisme, ils font vivre les sons électriques, leur insufflanl une étonnante vocalilé. J'ai dévoré les 33 tours Phillips aux pochettes minéralo-argentées (Série Perspeclives du XXème siècle) de François Bayle et Cie (musique concrète/GRM), il y a fort longtemps. Je retrouve souvent dans rouge gris bruit une même qualité de son, un raffinement similaire dans la démarche, cette fois manipulée dans un temps plus" réel ". La présence de Sophie Agnel confère à l'ensemble une dimension à la fois orchestrale et ludique. Les comparaisons de boucherie chirurgicale de l'auteur du texte de pochette et aussi graphiste de la belle illustration sont un peu littérales, mais elles offrent un point de vue nécessaire à qui veut se mettre cet objet sonore sous les oreilles. Musique difficile ? Laissez dérouler le son et suspendre le temps.
Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg l Jazz Around l Juillet 2002

De l'improvisation libre à la musique électroacoustique en passant par la musique concrète. Sophie Agnel, Lionel Marchetti et Jérôme Noetinger se sont ici rassemblés dans un commun désir de confronter certaines pratiques musicales et de les ouvrir sur des espaces à défricher. rouge gris bruit se construit à partir de sons générés par diverses sources: "piano extensif" (Agnel) et dispositif électroacoustique, regroupant magnétophones à bande, hauts-parleurs, micros et électronique (Marchetti-Noetinger). D'emblée le trio pose, jalonne, ponctue un espace qu'il décide ou non de remplir. Un vigoureux travelling de l'écoute s'opère. Ce sensible déplacement sonore est le fruit d'une minutieuse observation. Les trois musiciens commencent par scruter, sonder et esquisser des motifs, tout en posant avec fermeté les matériaux, afin d'en exploiter les potentiels. John Cage dit, à ce propos, que lorsque rien ne se passe, c'est la situation du potentiel maximum, là où le plus de choses peuvent arriver. Effectivement, très rapidement, on se sent investi par ce climat bien tempéré, nuancé, qui s'avère être le départ d'une vertigineuse traversée sonore. La matière est bien là, en pleine ébullition, des accords de piano concis ou martelés, des sirènes, des accents, des brisures, des cassures et des voix sont en constante retenue, mais se laissent percevoir à travers une fine brume en trame de fond. Chaque note, chaque coup, chaque éclat de son, semblent ponctuer les climats savamment dosés. Par des accents incantatoires, le trio s'engage ici dans la suggestion, non sans cahots, mettant en valeur la singularité des timbres et des couleurs.
Théo Jarrier l JazzMan l Mars 2002

On rouge gris bruit, gardeners of genetically modified produce Sophie Agnel, Lionel Marchetti, and Jérôme Noetinger chisel away at flocculence to make slabs interlock in a mosaic of excerpts in which estimating quantity and quality of gestation is a speculative, open-ended parlor game. Nothing is whole or complete; all is grafted, mediated, a sum of moving parts and arrangements. This three-act electroacoustic yarnball is about splashdown, and grandIy so - the moment travelers enter (or, if one believes they've been here before, return to) our plane and interact with natural elements. The trio shuttles a keystroke-ish parade of apparent deformities and alien jigsaw puppets into our waters. Seemingly limitless variations and mutations stream out. Whatever internal structures happen to reach a state of noticeable stability immediately collapse and become twinkles in a more dominant nebula. The sense of descent dominates rouge gris bruit: fractured tones frequently decrease in pitch; modifications steadily diminish the character of originals; the twenty-one-minute third act of Matin rolls me down the stairs.
S. Glass l Bananafish l September 2003

Taking clamour and silence seriously

Acceptance of electro-acoustic impulses seems to characterize much of the more interesting 21st Century european improvised music. Yet like the best sounds produced by influence-accepting free music, its hoary half-brother, electro-acoustic improv is most absorbing when it's a hybrid: a blend of acoustic and elecronic instrumentation.
The performers here have mated wiring and treatments with real time acoustic instruments. The output yields its own logic and soon takes over your inner ear to such an extent that you begin to forget the passage of time. This disc features three french experimenters. There is pianist Sophie Agnel, who improvises during the little more than fifty-eight minutes of the disc. her conceptions and forays are organized among the tapes and electronics of musique concrète composers Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger. Agnel who got her start playing jazz and classical music, before turning to free improv with the likes of hurdy gurdyist Dominique Regef, guitarist Noël Akchoté and fellow experimental pianist Andréa Neumann, is parsimonious in her choice and sounding of notes. Presumably creating inside and outside the box - or at least the piano frame - she never plays a chord where two notes would do or two notes when one would suffice. If a theme is introduced, it's quickly subsumed beneath the crinkle and tinkle of electronics. Should a glissando appear it dissolves into intermittent buzzes or some Donald Duck-style quacks. Strumming and scratching strings inside the frame is sometimes used as well, but never for more than a few seconds.
Outside of the occasional shaded right handed treble tremolos, in fact, the only time the piano really stands out from the mix is when Agnel indulges herself by bearing down on the sustain pedal for a protracted interval. This CD after all, takes it silence as seriously as its clamor. Two of the tracks at thirty-three and ten seconds respectively are nothing but noiselessness.
Marchetti who teaches at Université de Lyon and his long-time partner Noetinger, who is also a member of the twelve-member electronics aggregation MIMEO (Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra) unquestionably make up for the silence. During the course of the CD-long piece, panoply of found and otherworldly sounds makes their appearance. Many times, the crinkle, tinkle and overall rumbles of the tapes and electronics broken by what could be sonar responses to the whirrs and bangs of setting up a space antenna or monitoring short wave broadcasts from the Mother Ship.
Elsewhere,you'll hear something that appears to be a mechanical raspberry, a sequence of fowl noises, a harmonica tone, a pennywhistle, spinning tops and a bowling ball hitting the pins. The last brings out a pastoral semi-classical melody from Agnel. As she plays on, bombs appear to be falling, video game players seem to be nosily racking up points and a crackling fire dissolves what could have been a human voice.
Although only nonsense syllables are audible when a voice shouts through a megaphone early in the proceedings, by Après-midi an English voice clearly repeats "you'll get the message". Repeats that is, until the scratch of metal on metal and piano tinkles buries the phrase within the background of what could be the bark of a mechanical dog. Constantly reoccurring keyboard notes presage the end with what are apparently the dying cranks of a machine finally winding down.
By the end, the listener does get the message. Noise, streaming, and clatter provide a soundtrack for an overactive imagination as well as a way to shake up your thought process. The result makes a CD very worth investigating.
Ken Waxman l Musicworks l August 2003

As far as I, and my trusty French-English dictionary can tell, the title of this album translates as "Red-Grey Noise", a name that does little to convey the colorful assemblage of noises that are contained within the music of this French trio. Though it seems to be their first release together, rouge gris bruit features the three musicians finding common ground and a similar quality of sound, despite the substantial difference in instrumentation. Sophie Agnel's piano, though traditional in basic technique (it sounds as though she spends a good deal of time striking the keys from outside the piano), blends itself quite well with the electroacoustic cacophony of musique concrète composers Marchetti and Noetinger. Agnel's stabs of chords and note-clusters alternate with tinkling at the keyboard's upper end and loud, fast runs from one end of the instrument's range to the other punch through the whines and squibbles of the electronic sound. A sense of restraint creates a somewhat sparse and patient output from Agnel, which, when combined with the more unpredictable and jarring sounds created by Marchetti and Noetringer, provides a balance and tension that proves to be the album's biggest strength. Marchetti and Noetinger make use of microphones, speakers, and Revox audio components to spew forth a symphony of gurgling, whooping, clicking and bleeping that spans the distance between obviously synthesized sound and clunks that sound so organic it's like they're in the room with the listener. rouge gris bruit begins with the three-part suite of Matin (morning), an extended interplay of silence and sound, as all three musicians rarely play concurrently, and sounds tend to be short and fleeting. The piece ebbs and swells in intensity, but never reaches a fever pitch, adding to the tension previously alluded to. Five minutes into the following track, Après-Midi (afternoon) the clatter finally reaches tumultuous levels, even if only for a minute, before receding into more ambient territory for the rest of the track's fifteen minutes. The third selection, Epilogue, is a static haze of electronics, with Agnel often left underneath the more turbulent work of Marchetti and Noetinger. This happens from time to time, usually when the music becomes more intense, but during its quieter moments, Agnel's stark statements serve as the anchor of the music. The interplay between the three musicians is quite impressive, and rouge gris bruit is one if those group improvisations in which it's hard to find one player who outshines the others, and it's equally impossible to imagine the proceedings working as well less any contributor. This is teamwork done well, but it's never complacent or without the tension that makes it such an enjoyable listen.
Adam Strohm l Fakejazz.com l December 2002

Byzantine atmospherics reign supreme in the alien world of floating sound snippets and eerie lound sounds on rouge gris bruit. The twin electronic apparatuses of Marchetti and Noetinger orbit around the grounding acoustic magnet of Agnel's piano and the result is an electro-acoustic montage that is both enveloping and unsettling. Agnel deIves liberally into her instrument's viscera, plinking, plucking and castigating the tautly stretched strings seemingly to the point of fraying their surfaces. Flanging substratum static vies with tympani-like swells and oscillating whistles just at the fringes of audibility. Later, muffled megaphone vocalics and string-like skitters and scrapes collide in a textured and talkative dance. Everything is rendered in crystalline audio clarity allowing for the myriad of nuances to regularly seep to the surface, but it's difficult to parse what is pre-scripted and what the players spontaneously hatch. During the third part of the disc's dominating piece, what sounds like a chorus of dentist's drills buzzes darkly against a distant backdrop of delicate piano chords, chirruping pitch echoes and a humming sonic catwalk of electrical voltage. Soon after, the ominous reverie is interrupted by scribbling shots of crinkling and horn-like bursts. The journey's longevity is too protracted and circuitous for my tastes, as is the relentless seeming randomness of much of the sound making, not to mention its electronic origins. Still, the sheer diversity of teeming artificial sounds melded onto a chassis of recognizable piano is likely to make for an absorbing listen to better equipped and accustomed ears.
Derek Taylor l Cadence l August 2002

Pianist Sophie Agnel is matched with Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger, who make use of a wide array of electronics, including manipulated microphones and loudspeakers. Though the liner notes are not very forthcoming about the way the music was created, the trio’s improvisations appear to have been further shaped and morphed in the studio by Marchetti’s editing. It’s a music that makes striking use of aural perspective. Across a background wash of out-of-focus electronics or detuned radio burble, crisp and sometimes violent exchanges shoot like comets. Agnel’s clipped phrases are often very widely spaced, and on occasion wobble disconcertingly, as if being shaken back and forth. The piano is sometimes right in front of you, but just as often sounds like it’s playing on a distant radio. Conventions of musical dialogue and interaction are almost completely displaced, though there are flashes of wit and the whole thing is anything but austere. Rather than as “free improvisation,” this needs to be listened to as a sonic artifact, possessing an indubitable but almost alien internal logic. Excellent.
Nate Dorward l Coda l July 2002

Frenchman Jérôme Noetinger is fantastique at improvised electronics. He comes from musique concrète and experimental film, and his Metamkine is the only ensemble I have witnessed which manages to free-improvise convincingly with projected visuals and lights. ln this group, Lionel Marchetti uses similar equipment to Noetinger (microphones, loudspeakers, electronics, Revox) and Sophie Agnel plays piano. Agnel is evidently utterly familiar with the keyboard, and you can imagine her playing anything from Debussy to Boulez to Henry Cowell. She dives beneath the lid to create echoic effects which form a bridge to the others' electronic brutalisms, but also unzip fluid runs which allow traditional halmony to interpret their sounds.
This is intelligent, humorous improvisation with a strong sense of structure. The trio play games with the listener's attention, and some of the expostulations and surprises from Marchetti and Noetinger are priceless.
Ben Watson l HiFi News l June 2002