AFFLUX

Excerpts from a six hour live concert/installation that incroporated the sounds and noises of the bygoing traffic. Great work by Cordier/Guinnet/La Casa and beautifully designed by Dale Lloyd. Your ear is an excellent microphone. Imagine to be in a crowded place, close your eyes and listen. You will pay attention to detailed sounds around you, simply because your mind allows you to ignore the surrounding sounds, those you don't want to hear. Afflux does something like that, except that they use real microphones and contact microphones in a location. TNT cultural centre in Bordeaux is apparently a big building with a bar/restaurant, offices, concert space and a top floor. Afflux attached many contact microphones to all of these places and they were connected to a 32 channel mixer and the resultant mix was played over eight speakers in the concert half. The whole concert lasted six hours. Afflux is the collaboration of Eric Cordier, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa, all three composers in their own right. From the six hours of recordings, Eric La Casa edited this fifty one minute CD, with just one piece. We hear sounds that we recognize, like people talking, the elevator, maybe the coffee machine, but they all appear to be far away, or embedded in a strange environment - maybe like we would hear this when we would inside such a big environment ourselves, but now the ears don't select: the selection has been made for us, by La Casa. Our ears are now focussed on this CD, and not the rain outside, or own coffee machine. This makes this into quite a strange listening affair, since we recognize the daily sounds that we would always recognize but also all these other sounds. It makes this however not an uneasy affair, but rather a fascinating one: what are these sounds, and where are they going to? It's a highly captivating soundscape that is captured here. Not so much with a 'story' or a 'composition', but ambient music in the true meaning of the word: music made of the ambience. Gorgeous music. (label info)