Comment for the booklet of 'Formnction'

by Diego Chamy

Formnction (Potlatch P209) is a recording by Narthex, the duo formed by Marc Baron (saxophone) and Loïc Blairon (double bass).

Description of the work

In order to make this recording, Marc Baron and Loïc Blairon recorded six 30 minute long improvisations in six different places, chosen by their character (their acoustics and, to a lesser extent, their background noise). After recording, they divided these six improvisations into six parts of 5 minutes each. Then, a new piece was built up by putting together the first 5 minutes of the first recording, the second 5 minutes of the second recording, and so on, until the last 5 minutes of the last recording, making again a 30-minute long piece. The parts were not chosen for how interesting they were; the authors strictly followed the order on which they recorded them.

Besides this 30-minute piece made out of these 5 minute excerpts, this CD also includes a “numeric clone” or digital version of one of these six improvisations. By numeric clone, they mean that they have replaced all the saxophone sounds with a sine wave and all the contrabass sounds with another sine wave, keeping the rest as numeric blank.

Comment for the booklet

Musicians and composers are usually concerned about following or discovering a certain logic which would be internal and particular to the piece on which they are working. However, Formnction refuses this idea from the beginning. Its parts are put together without following inner material reasons. Like patchwork (or a quilt), the materials consist of unselected remnants from other pieces, and the focus is more on the shape or form that the authors wanted to construct with these 5 minute long excerpts than in what the excerpts themselves are. The musical content of these excerpts was not judged, and it seems that there were no predetermined expectations regarding what the final result would be.

Not judging the musical content of these excerpts makes any aim of essentialism immediately disappear. At the same time, the time entity “5 minutes” receives a special reality status, which doesn’t depend on its content. It is now free to function differently, not in what it is but in the temporal relations it maintains with other entities. In this way, the “material” of the piece – or what we think it is – is ignored. The 5 minutes, understood as concrete pieces of time, become the sole material. Formnction is an attempt to take a step beyond the way we understand materiality. And this is confirmed not only in the first piece, which is a kind of diagram made out of simplified digitally generated media, but also in the acoustic piece, in which we also encounter a conversion in the material, but by other means (not by creating a diagram but by arbitrarily mutilating acoustic recordings).

But essentialism is not the only ideal compromised. Any aim of naturalism disappears too, because, although the pieces were not recorded in a studio, the site-specific work ideal is still broken since the pieces are arbitrarily cut and put together. In the acoustic piece, the audible characteristics of the surroundings where the pieces were recorded are reduced to the minimum needed for creating a clear understanding of passing from one excerpt to the other. The different surroundings express nothing else. The transitions are what should be heard, not the sounds. The same goes for the digital piece (even when we don’t have the surroundings in it to help us understand the end of one excerpt and the beginning of the next).

In Formnction there is a shift in the normal idea of matter which makes time a completely strange entity. We imagine time as a container where events occur, or as a pure intellectual structure. But Formnction makes these interpretations unsatisfactory: time is taken out of these categories and we are pushed to experience it in its material dimension. The concept of matter is separated from the empirical (wasn’t the empirical always the most abstract thing?), and once this happens, we have two new things: an empirical plane not constituted by materiality, and a new matter that has nothing to do with anything empirical. We are put somewhere else, left with questions that we are not sure we can answer; questions thrown to the future (the now). What is happening in between these 5-minute extracts? Why aren’t we able to experience 5 minutes all at once? Would it be better to scratch this CD before playing it? And what about any other CD?

Diego Chamy, June 2008