drawing The Art of Dying | the Gojira project

Huun-Huur-Tu - Mongolian throat singing

I recently came across an excellent recording of Mongolian throat singing by the ensemble Huun-Huur-Tu. You can hear bits of mongolian throat singing in Gojira's The Art of Dying, especially in the introductory sequences. I found it extremely interesting to watch such high-quality performance - the sounds Huun-Huur-Tu create are incredible, absolutely mesmerizing.

Kyuss in Milan, March 23, 2011

I really love making lomo videos of concert experiences. I often go right in the middle of the pit with my camera wrapped around my wrist, not focused on anything in particular, just capturing the energy of the music kinesthetically (like this clip from Down at Gods of Metal 2009). 

So when I went to see Kyuss, cult stoner band from the early 90's, in Milan on March 23, 2011 with my American friend E., I went prepared.  

We were right up against the barrier at the front of the stage. My camera was just dangling off my wrist and I kept forgetting to turn it off, and ended up recording by mistake the light reflections on the barrier! 

 

 

This concert experience was quite exceptional for me, synesthetically, because the bass was just so strong. The photisms I saw while hearing and feeling the music were quite incredible: these tendrils wrapping themselves around my legs, and the vibrations looked like black splotches with lots of tiny, horizontal shimmering white lines.

I liked these video sequences because they really reminded me of the intensity of the sound and its physical effet. (I over-exposed the segments to accentuate the light effects.) 

 

These guys put on a great show to a sold-out house, by the way!

Gojira - The Art of Dying (live at the festival Les Vieilles Charrues 2010)

Gojira played at the festival Les Vieilles Charrues in Brittany July 17th, the day just following the concert in Blois. This clip of The Art of Dying gives a great idea of their excellent live sets.

Meeting Gojira

Gojira is touring this summer and I thought it would be the perfect time to try to meet them. I’ve been working on the Art of Dying project for over a year now, and I really wanted to try to show them my work – even though it’s not finished yet - and see what they thought.

So last Friday morning (July 16), I got on the 6:30 AM train from Nice, and traveled 9 hours to Blois, a small town about 2 hours from Paris. The show was scheduled in a small club, the Chato’do. 

I was a bit nervous. I talked to the girl running the merch stand, to see if possibly there was some way of meeting them. I wasn’t too sure if anything would happen – especially since I knocked a full cup of water all over the merch table! But she texted me later on, told me to come back and wait after the show.

Gojira à Blois, Flying Whales 

I had a great time at the show. They played well, and the ambiance was really great. It was a full house, with kids crowdsurfing and stagediving all over the place. There were feet in the air everywhere, it was a bit funny even.

Gojira à Blois, fin de concert

After the show, I waited around for about 2 hours, talking to a couple of really wasted and aboslutely hilarious guys. 

Around 1:30 AM, most of the club had cleared out, and the guys from the band came out. 

I was able to meet the Mario Duplantier (drums) first. I started talking about the project and pulled out the little moleskine notebook I’ve been working in. I think at first he didn’t expect much of anything other than random fan art. 

And then I unfolded the whole moleskine notebook (the accordion is several feet long!) and talked about the idea behind it… and he said, oh we’ve got to get Joe over here to see this. Joe Duplantier is his brother and the singer/guitar player. From what I understand, they do the primary song-writing in the band.

The whole experience was quite surreal. They were very friendly and seemed very genuine, and it was quite different from meeting an American group: it didn’t seem as superficial, and was much less intimidating because of that.

 

It seemed like they were taken aback by the complexity and depth of the work – and mentioned several times that it was the first time anyone had shown them anything like that.

One of the things Joe said was that the project captured the basis of their creative thought-process – strings of sequences looping around each other. Mario talked about about how their songs are percussion-based, because the guitar, bass and voice also function as essentially percussive elements.

We talked a little about visualizing music, and Joe mentioned how they often talk together about the color of their songs and that they coordinate the lighting with those colors! And of course I was spacey and forgot to ask what their colors for the songs were. I regret not asking what color the “Art of Dying” is for them.

I would have loved to be able to talk with them more about their creative process and the way that they see things, composition-wise and creatively. 

But just meeting and talking with the Duplantier brothers and showing them my artwork was an experience I'll never forget.

 

With Joe Duplantier:

 

 

Nuit surprenante: Radulescu

Last weekend we attended Nuit Surprenante, a concert in the Monaco Printemps des Arts series. It really was a very surprising evening: the concert featured a variety of contemporary works and ensembles, including the Ensemble Accroche Note playing Horatiu Radulescu's Inner Time II.

We were completely unprepared for the Horatiu Radulescu piece - some of the most painful "music" I have ever listened to. The piece, which lasts nearly 1 hour, features 7 clarinets playing seemingly random, atonal sequences of notes... at earsplitting pitches. Just for fun, here is an extract of the piece:

I was able to make it about half-way through... and then I just couldn't take it anymore! I had to leave -  with a splitting headache!

The piece did prove to be extremely interesting in a completely contradictory way. Inner Time II was painful to listen to, but extremely beautiful as a synesthetic experience: strings of shapes and colors woven together. Sharp vertical rectangles that shimmered, literally, in a gorgeous palette of yellows, yellow-oranges, and eggshell whites, on bright white background. I wasn't surprised by the prevalence of white - it's my color for pain. Totally natural given the loud, shrill nature of the work.

I drew this rather summary figure to illustrate what the piece looked like to me (click on the image to better see the details).

This synesthetic experience intrigued me nonetheless, and upon returning home, I began researching Radulescu. And I have to say... I'm fascinated by this composer and his work!

Radulescu is often described as a spectral composer, because he often focused on the spectral technique of composition, that is, where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. This can also be described as a type of aesthetic, where music is ultimately considered as sound evolving in time. Spectral music can include any music that foregrounds timbre as an important element of structure or musical language (thanks wikipedia).

Inner Time II is meant as homage to Alexander Calder. As explained in these liner notes:

The basic material is a single registral filter, a basic shape (mobile of distinctly Calder-like appearance laid over the spectral scordatura, which in its macro form provides the overall descent-ascent, and on a smaller scale furnishes 137 mobiles - derived from the basic one by the quasi-serial processes of inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion, as well as contraction and expansion in space (pitch) and time.

I find this analogy to Calder's mobiles to be very accurate, and immediately brings to mind the dancing multiples of rectangles I perceived. Dancing rhythmically because the notes being played either just before, just after or on the pulsations. And also "melodically," as the same liner notes explain;

The pitch structure is based on a scale of 42 pitches (spectral scordatura) which are the partials 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and then every odd-numbered partial up to the 83rd of a low A; the emphasis on odd-number partials neatly matches the natural timbre of the clarinet, reinforcing as the composer puts it, "the sober and poetic unity of the score". The 6th partial is the bottom E on the clarinet; the 83rd lies just below the high D which marks the top of the conventional E flat clarinet range (though here, astonishingly, all the high partials are achieved on the normal B flat instrument!). Each clarinettist has a repertoire of just six steps of the scale (six frequency orbits), spread throughout the total range. However, since an enormous degree of accuracy of intonation is called for, especially in the highest register, where distinctions are notated to the nearest 64th of a tone, and then further inflected in cents (highly accurate tuning devices are used to find a basic fingering given for each note, and used again in rehearsal for verification), even the production of these six notes is a Herculean labour.

This rough overview of some of the facets of Radulescu's work really has me intrigued, and I'm looking forward to learning more, especially about his forays into graphic notation.

Akiko Suwanai - a cross-section of sound

Last Sunday, November 1st, we went to see Akiko Suwanai perform the Brahms violin concerto with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic. I really enjoyed her interpretation of the concerto and her style of playing. She plays with a very rich, warm, controlled tone, without being overly flashy, which I felt fit the piece perfectly. 

Here is a cross-section of what her sound looks like to me, synesthetically. The deeper tones in her sound were a nice, warm red - even leaning towards a brownish-red at times - but with an airy texture. When playing in a higher register, it was interesting to see that she kept that same light, airy tone. I also felt the shape of her sound was interesting, because it wasn't perfectly round. 

 

Down at Gods of Metal 2009

This past summer, we saw the band Down at the Gods of Metal festival in Monza, Italy. 

During the song Lifer, I filmed from the pit, close to the stage. Although the audio leaves quite a bit to desire, it's interesting to see how the visuals mesh with the song's movement and what was happening in the pit. +

At one point, I was able to catch my breath. During this lull in the storm, I tried to focus the camera on the several of the guys from Mastodon, who had come out on the side of the stage to watch Down perform.

This is what the recorded version of the song sounds like: