AKA009 : BRÈVE RETRAITE AU COUVENT
VINCENT EPPLAY
This
recording documents a sound-performance curated by Franck Ancel in
homage to Varese’s « Poeme Electronique ». This musical
milestone was commissioned for the Philips Pavilion created by Le
Corbusier and Xenakis on the occasion of Expo’58, the Brussels World’s
Fair that was held from 17 April to 19 October 1958. Le Corbusier
envisioned an “art total’’ utopia involving space, music and images all
at once. As soon as he was hired by the dutch company, he announced his
intent to create an « electronic poem » in a bottle. That
bottle would be the Pavilion. While Xenakis’ piece Concrèt
PH could be heard at the entrance and the exit of the Pavilion,
Varese’s composition, based on a complex spatialization scheme, was
displaid through hundreds of speakers, prefiguring the concept of
acousmonium. Xenakis and Le Corbusier collaborated again on Tourette’s
Convent, a dominican community located in the suburbs of Lyon. Both
Philips’ Pavilion and Tourette’s Convent opened universal and
meditative gates, linking musical composition and architecture with a
scientific precision. From Varese’s audiovisual journey through space
and time to Xenakis architecture of sound builded in wave-like glass,
those avant-gardist creations were among the first attempts to
interlink artistic disciplines within a building specifically designed
by Le Corbusier for this purpose. Sound as architecture, sound as
environment, sound as timeless meditation.
At Franck Ancel’s invitation, Vincent Epplay restored the acoustic
properties of this one-of-a-kind church. The featured recording is the
edit of a 24-hours live session inside the big nave of its chapel. The
sound is determined and guided by the whole shape of the building,
especially the pieces of undulatory glass that were builded under the
directive of Xenakis’ architectural score. Epplay’s musical equipment
(mixing desk, EMS synthi AKS suitcase synthetizer, effects and
electronic filters) was settled in the center of the nave and
« tuned » in order to reveal the specific resonance of this
geometrical building made out of glass and concrete.
> WEBSITE : HTTP://WWW.VIPLAYLAND.NET
