Christian Zanési, composer of acousmatic music and assistant director of the GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicale – Musical Research Group), has just released an album called Soixante dix-huit tours on the label Double Entendre. The title is a reference to the famous 78s made in 1949 by Pierre Schaeffer, known as the father of music concrete, and of whom we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth. Interview.
On what occasion did you meet Vibrö?
Valérie Vivancos and Rodolphe Alexis – who created Vibrö and Double Entendre— contacted me in 2005 to invite me to take part in the 3rd issue of their sound magazine. We met and got on really well immediately. From that point we started to have a very strong relationship, and at the beginning of 2009, we brought up the idea to make a CD. I hadn’t made one for quite some time, this vantage motivated me. A release forces to deliver the final version of a work.
How does this album positions itself in your approach and your work?
Like many others, I’m in constant evolution. In general, I don’t compose while analyzing the cultural and political environment to find “an attack angle”; I simply let an encounter with the sound – often fortuitous – operate. A sound that, at a certain moment, imposes itself and brings me enough motivations, I could even say energy, to take the plunge in the (internal) trip that is composition. I’m sure that all the ideas we can have about the world, about life, about the relationships we have with others, are naturally present in our own work. We can only explain them if we use significant elements like text of documentary words. So, in the 2 pieces of this CD, it’s possible to hear the sounds I’ve met.
What’s the colour of this specific project, it sounds industrial / noisy…?
I you tell me it sounds “industrial / noisy”, I’ll trust you. Personally I don’t know how it sounds. In a way I’m “inside” it. I hear organic relationships between different elements, key elements, a listening path and even more a kind of living organism that expends with time. Moreover, for the past few years, I’ve become particularly interested in the history of our music. I’ve been active in this field for several decades and I’ve therefore lived this history intensely. I a way that I have the feeling that a certain number of sounds, milestone sounds, are part of me. That’s what I reactivated in the 2 pieces of the CD.
Why did you choose to make 2 15-minute tracks?
Fifteen minutes is a good format for me. I work with few sounds and in this length I can develop musical ideas without haste nor excessive length. What’s important to me is that the listening is active from the first to the last sound. It’s a formal balance to find. So, in this prospect, maintaining thirty minutes of really intense music seems ambitious to me.
How do you work on your compositions?
Like I said before I need to meet with a sound. When I say sound, I mean a substance that is touching me and of which I feel the potential development. Then I intensely listen to this substance in all its proprieties. I feel with what it could be associated; I imagine and I build a kind of orchestra that is going to be the instrument of my project. Project that evolves little by little until the (dischargeable) feeling that what I wanted to say was told. That’s to say when I’ve put all my energy in the project. Small miracle: this energy is transmitted (in the best case) to the listener.
Could you tell us more about your radio show?
I run, together with David Jisse and Christophe Bourseiller, every Monday nights at midnight on France Musique, Électromania. A one-hour show of which programming principle is particularly adapted to the radio. Each of us three arrives with 3 types of music: Christophe, rather experimental rock, David rather mixed music and me, rather classical electro music. Each of us presents “his” music, and reacts to the others that were presented to him. It makes varied programs (which is impossible for one and only programmer) and above all it reveals the extreme richness of all those repertoires. In fact, we navigate from one discovery to another and we realize, week after week, that the walls between different types of music using technology only exist in our brains. This can seem pedantic, but I have the feeling that if we listen again to that shows one day, in fifty or a hundred years, we’ll have a particularly striking image of a whole era.
ACW&LD
Christian Zanési, Soixante dix-huit tours (Double Entendre). Information: www.double-entendre.org
Playlist:
Bernard Parmegiani, De natura sonoru, (L’Œuvre Musicale / Ina GRM)
Pierre Henry, Le voyage, d’après Le livre des Morts tibétain (Phillips)
Luc Ferrari, Presque rien and Far-West News (L’Œuvre Électronique / Ina GRM)
Kraftwerk, Electric Café (Kling Klang Product)
Pierre Schaeffer, L’étude aux objets (Ina GRM)
Neil Young, Dead Man (Warner)
François Bayle, L’expérience acoustique (Magison)
Einstürzende Neubauten, Kollaps ( Potomak)
Matmos, Quasi-objects (Matamor)
Pan Sonic, Aaltopiiri (Blast First)
From: MCD 56 | Buy this edition
version Fr
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