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Track listing detail

Draugalimur

eRikm / Icelandic traditional

  • Year of composition: 2014-15, 16
  • Version: Adapt. Ásdís R Magnúsdóttir, Trad. Jean Renaud
  • Duration: 17:45
  • Instrumentation: 8-channel fixed medium
  • Publisher(s): Éditions José Corti / Ymx média
  • Commission: French State (Music Office), Ina-GRM
  • ISWC: T7033612852

Stereo

ISRC CAD501810025

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

The attraction science-fiction and Genre cinema has exerted on me by from early childhood was triggered at the announcement of the film Prometheus, the prequel to the film Alien, by director Ridley Scott. At the screening of that film I got completely absorbed in the images of the prolog filmed in the natural settings of Dettifos in Iceland.

Dettifos is the fall. It plunges into the Jökulsá Canyon at Fjöllum right in the middle of a volcanic rock desert. The more than 40 meters high fall, will be the starting point of my trip to Iceland. The natural if not supernatural power of the elements constitute the monumental landscapes and timescapes of the world island — they echo with my decade of travels above 60 degrees North latitude and under 30 degrees South latitude.

Draugalimur (Phantom Limb, in English) is a crossing from the intimate to vast open spaces, traversed by the elements in motion. Ice, air, gas and fire are in perpetual activity in the chaotic and primitive far off. It resembles the more than five hundred million years ago surface of the earth.

In Reykjavik (Iceland) I made acquaintance with Islandic visual artist Haraldur Jónsson. He told me an Islandic tale Móðir mín, í kví, kví (My mother in the park, park) that deeply stirred me. I didn’t know then how major a part it would play in the composition of the coming piece nor how it would create symbolic resonance with my own life.

Draugalimur is a work with the acoustics and sound effect of the natural elements: ice breaking; the sounds of gigantic interiors of cod liver oil tanks in ruins; the textures of the memory of anciently whale and other cetacean slaughtering quays.

Crossing a desert hopelessly dressed in black ash, raptured from Nature down under a steel bridge, drifting icebergs are aspired from their lagoon into the Arctic Ocean, a lure at low tide. I saw, upright a sandur, four diffracted suns then grey-green, reclining orange to lethal white or the lordosis of the earth.

In the shade of warm barks or amongst pestilential mud in sulphur yellow, pink clay soufrières hope only for the eruption of an anguished geyser. The fallen fluorescence of horizons of lichen, the definitive fall of a millennium serac, only the laughing tern can face up to such complexity.

Draugalimur is an essay, an attempt to build a link between the power of the elements and the imaginary of inhabitants — an attachment by means of the setting and diverse articulations of concrete and oneiric materials of the (still) fantastic island.

[English translation: Alice Cormack, iv-17]


Draugalimur — subtitled Membre fantôme — was realized in 2014-15 at the composer’s studio in Marseille (France) and premiered on January 24, 2015 as part of the Multiphonies series presented by the Ina-GRM at the Auditorium Saint-Germain of the MPAA (Paris, France). The piece was commissioned by the French State (Music Office) and the Ina-GRM (Paris). Text: Móðir mín, í kví, kví (My mother in the park, park), Islandic folklore; French version taken from La géante dans la barque de pierre et autres contes d’Islande, Jón Árnaso, Éditions José Corti (2003). Recorded voices: Dominique Poulain, Haraldur Jónsson. Thanks to Dominique Poulain, Haraldur Jónsson, Natacha Muslera, Arnlín Óladóttir, Christian Zanési, Magnús Rafnsson, and Jean Cristofol.


Premiere

  • January 24, 2015, Multiphonies 2014-15: Akousma, Auditorium Saint-Germain — MPAA, Paris (France)

Composition

  • 2014 – 2015

Revision

  • 2016-10 – 2016-12

About this recording

This version was mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and eRikm from October to December 2016 in Vimercate (Italy).

Mastering

Poudre

eRikm

  • Year of composition: 2013, 16
  • Duration: 17:22
  • Instrumentation: 8-channel fixed medium
  • Publisher(s): Ymx média
  • Commission: L’audible festival
  • ISWC: T7033612727

Stereo

ISRC CAD501810026

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

Poudre was a puff of nocturnal aroma on the Berliner asphalt of the Eberswalder Straße in Alexanderplatz (Germany). New Year’s Eve, where everyone lits a firework in front of their apartment building, evokes an acoustic afterglow echoing with the history and architecture of the city. From this popular event comes a subjacent feeling that oscillates between a state of insurrection, movements of rebellion or of a carnival party.

Acoustic symptoms arise, generated by the saturation of air and space due to the detonation of crackers activated in series. Hidden under the mask of a collective euphoria, the frustrations of the population explode in a loud noise probably proportional to its degree of alienation in society.

Fire, the artefact will to re-deploy these sound moments in the context of a public or home listening. Imagine offering this piece to the protagonists of this mistpoeffers unconscious. This could certainly irritate or attack their own sound exhalations.

[English translation: John Anthony Huss, iv-17]


Poudre was realized in 2013 at the composer’s studio in Marseille (France) and premiered on September 13, 2013 as part of L’audible festival at Théâtre L’Échangeur (Bagnolet, France). The piece was commissioned by L’audible festival. Thanks to Jérôme Noetinger, Instants chavirés, and Michaela Stella Bagnoli.


Premiere

  • September 13, 2013, L’audible festival 2013: Soirée 2, Théâtre L’Échangeur, Bagnolet (Seine-Saint-Denis, France)

Composition

  • 2013

Revision

  • 2016-10 – 2016-12

About this recording

This version was mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and eRikm from October to December 2016 in Vimercate (Italy).

Mastering

L’aire de la Moure 2

eRikm / Paul Éluard

  • Year of composition: 2013
  • Original work: L’aire de la Moure
  • Version: Arr. eRikm, 2015-16 [original work]
  • Duration: 18:17
  • Instrumentation: stereo fixed medium
  • Publisher(s): Éditions Gallimard / Ymx média
  • Commission: GR2013, Radio Grenouille for Marseille-Provence 2013 — Capitale européenne de la culture
  • ISWC: T9244641267

Stereo

ISRC CAD501810027

  • 44,1 kHz, 16 bits

To Jean Paul Barde

The area of Moure is a physical and representative site (at scale 0) of risk management of future disasters related to human activity. It is a symptom of this activity, the management of these risks can affect the change (makeup due to the retardant) of the ‘natural’ site: terrain modification (acidity…), its flora and fauna.

This area, unlike the rest of the massif, is watered periodically. Salt water and retardant — made of fire-retardant salt: ammonium phosphate; thickener: gum or clay; dye: iron oxide; andd some other components in small quantities — are dropped by the ballet of Pelicans (Canadair CL-415), Trackers (Grumman S-2), and other planes. The place has a symbolic function (stigmatizing, red) in an environment that consists of white limestone and scrubland, with slopes covered with Aleppo pines. The area is visible from a variety of places from the city of Marseille and its surroundings, such a monument making me strangely reminiscent of the sacred rock (for Aboriginals) of Uluru in Australia.

The book The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin has opened me to a vision of the Australian continent in particular. This fantasy is mixed with sandstone winds space crystallized by the theories of Paul Virilio, where speed and accident led me to the childhood: I wanted to become a flying being.

The genesis of my work has proven to be flying through sounds, words and images. The experience of traveling through the ends of the countries I’ve been through, gives me the feeling that the site of the area of Moure is not charged.

It was not my sense of telluric magnetic or vibratory power, as when one is facing with a glacier, a rainforest or when making the experience of being in the middle of the Roland rift…

The area of the Moure is masked and perverted to the needs of men, even in its linguistic morphogenesis: “l’amour”; the mourre of pouar: pig’s snout in Provence (characteristic fishing boat on the Mediterranean coast) [wikipedia].

At first, I had to unconsciously use the imagination of my childhood deprived of adult prejudice to enter into this landscape. The appropriation of the site by the imaginary (I), to whom I gave a symbolically (S) sacred or even magical sense, led me to create through existing holes, a third hole between the two dimensions (I, S). This third hole or void transmits in each listeners reality a kind of timeless instant of games, and the “I” of a speculative fiction, connected to a memory resource, a source of imagination.

[English translation: John Anthony Huss, iv-17]


L’aire de la Moure 2 was revised in 2015-16 at the composer’s studio in Marseille (France) from L’aire de la Moure of 2013 which was commissioned by GR2013 and Radio Grenouille for Marseille-Provence 2013 — European Capital of Culture. Text: À la flamme des fouets by Paul Éluard, © Éditions Gallimard. Recorded voices: Natacha Muslera, eRikm. Thanks to Jean Paul Barde (technical typology), Julie de Muer, and Bernard Clavier.


Revision

  • 2015 – 2016-12

About this recording

This version was mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and eRikm from October to December 2016 in Vimercate (Italy).

Mastering