20-21/09/2021

h.20 Auditorium San Fedele

Eliane Radigue
L’Île Re-Sonante

David Monacchi
Stati d’Acqua

Sound engineer: Massimo Colombo

The inaugural concert after the pandemic season proposes for the first time in Italy with the acousmonium a reference work of the electronic repertoire, L’Île Re-sonante by Eliane Radigue, a broad continuum of 55 minutes, of intense timbral stratification, a metaphorical journey between life and death. 

ÉLIANE RADIGUE
L’Île Re-sonante
A great work in a single movement, the incipit is a gradual oscillation that pulsates through the silence. The cycles of the waves progressively concentrate to become one with the environment. Striking is the section of looped intersections of illusory female voices which constitute one of the most memorable moments in Radigue's work, perhaps even in the history of minimalism in general. 

The basic harmony of the matrix drone comes to a sunny Brucknerian chord, then moves to another blurry image, and Radigue’s ARP (synthesizer) returns in a dominant fashion, projecting the sonic wrecks into the place where light meets and darkness. A journey into the heart of sound. In summary: from sound drones to very fine granular sounds, an atmosphere of semi-consciousness is created, which suspends all acoustic cues, confining oneself to a state of daydreaming. 

Eliane Radigue writes in the program of the first performance of L’Île Re-sonante:
“Project born in November 1998, for the Berkeley CNMAT and its director David Wessel. First
title: «Île Sonante» in reference to … But also a title that seemed so appropriate to the place,
suspended on the side of a hill to which a walkway gives access. Michel Chion had kindly
authorized me to co-use this title. It then became evidently Re-sonante, in development, a return
to analog sound sources, after a long and totally unsuccessful attempt to convert to MIDI and other
digital modes. I thank Gérard Pape for proposing the rehabilitation of Serge Modular and David
Jisse for welcoming him into his study. Hours spent with the magnificent Serge Modular instrument
took me back a few decades to the time of my discovery of ARP. I tried to combine the qualities of
these two instruments, which are among the best of that generation, being their date more or less the
same … Re-sonante; also concerns the conception of this work, a very classic construction, in which
the first part would be reflected in the central part, which would be like the mirror of a lake, from
which the third part would emerge, both from its depths. than from its reflection. I thank the
CCMIX and Muse en Circuit staff for their hospitality, in particular Stéphane Kim who was able to
give life with patience and passion to the Serge, and Brian O’Reilly for his competent and
dedicated assistance in the creation of the final mix of this L’Île Re-sonante in the CCMIX studios.
(Éliane Radigue)

DAVID MONACCHI

Fragments of Extinctions
Since 1990, composer David Monacchi has conducted field recordings in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, North and South America. During a 2002 pilot project in the Brazilian Amazon conducted in collaboration with Greenpeace, Monacchi recorded his first high definition sonic portraits of an intact tropical ecosystem. Other missions followed in Borneo, Africa and Ecuador. With these unique recordings of primary forests he has composed exceptional, eco-acoustic field recordings, works created to enhance the original sounds of landscapes by artificially intervening in the sound spectrum. Fragments of Extinction is an interdisciplinary project with a specific environmentalist drive, integrating scientific inquiry and the ways in which their aesthetic characteristics of soundscapes can be explored, interacted with and presented to the public. The soundscapes of these ecosystems, recorded in high fidelity with stereophonic techniques and first order ambisonics for the performance in an eco-acoustic theater, still maintain their original quality thanks to the Acusmonium SATOR diffusion system.

The idea of recording the purity of natural sound has evolved over time, in my work, into space- conservative recordings that not only record time, frequency and timbres but also space, the spatial relationship between sounds, proximity, the direction. And perhaps a mindscape came from there, from the direct consequence of specifically analyzing the spatial relationships between sounds. A valley, two nightingales chirping from one side of the valley to the other, the crickets that make it a sound carpet … All this is often taken for granted, the structure of this sound is often trivialized, but if you analyze this thing with depth , you can really visualize space through sound. The mindscape is not inventive, but it comes to bring back a fidelity of sound which is the organization of soundscapes. (David Monacchi)