ANTIPODES

Saturday 14 May
8.30pm
Rymer Auditorium

preceded at 7.30pm by Denis Dufour, Frédéric Acquaviva and Loré Lixenberg in Conversation

ANTIPODES (2019) 
for voices, dead electronics and video, 69'


with the voices of Joël Hubaut (+ text), Dorothy Iannone and Loré Lixenberg, mezzo- soprano

I wanted for a long time to do a large scale work based on my friend, the poet and artist Joël Hubaut. I asked Joël to perform some of the words taken from a selection of 18 posca drawings of his series "Epidemik Diary", and I recorded his voice in London on July 2019 at Resident Studio. The titles of those plates are enounced by the hipnotic voice of the american artist Dorothy Iannone that I had recorded in her Berlin studio. The score and composition of ANTIPODES took place at EMS, in Stockholm and was completed in November 2019 in my own studio in London. In this piece, I deepen my 10 years work on the endless vocal capacities of Loré Lixenberg's voice.

ANTIPODES is divided in 3 parts : I. Hell / II. Purgatory / III. Paradise and also comprises (apart those extreme vocalities which leads at some point to a 36 parts choir section), some "dead electronics" plus other speaking mouths. Each section is in itself subdivided in 6 parts based on the drawings. I initially thought of composing in a much more simple way than my usual writing, as my motto is "Never Repeat Yourself". However, if I actually have succeeded in doing something new for me, it is by composing a unique form mixing both simplicity and complexity. A strange complexity that would be the accumulation of successive simplicities, added one to the other, making ANTIPODES a kind of a hell of a Divine Comedy.

ANTIPODES exists in several incarnations, as always with my work : a QR-Code record without a record, a serigraph QR-Code on canvas printed at 2 copies that was exhibited in my solo show MUSIC FOR WALLS at Gallery Satellite during the Covid-19 lockdown and a spatialised concert (created at Donaueschingen, October 2021)

FA