(échos)

(échos) was composed in 2016-2017 with the sounds of the Faï Valley and the music of Bear Bones, Lay Low, Jean Bender, Pôm Bouvier B., Joaquim Brissaud, Clara De Asís & Laura Vazquez, Golem Mécanique, Homnimal, Piotr Kurek, Stephen O'Malley, Léo Maurel & Julien Desailly, Sourdure, and Thomas Tilly.

All the sounds were recorded during the 4th Échos Festival and the week preceding it, in June and July 2016 (with the exception of an appearance by Insiden, recorded two years earlier and which opens the album).

The album was released by the Dôme Association, organizer of the festival.

(échos) is neither a documentary about a festival, nor a compilation, nor a remix album. Although a bit of these things transpires from the 15 tracks that make up the album. But (échos) is above all an interpretation of a place and a sonic moment, an Alpine electroacoustic essay.
The proposal (…) was both clear and vague: to record a place, the context of the festival, and the music of the 14 guest artists, in order to recompose an original creation. For reassurance, a request was sent to everyone: "Do you accept that the echoes of your music be captured, revisited, reappropriated, reinterpreted, perhaps even betrayed?"

If such a thing was possible and made sense, it was thanks to the location: the Faï Valley and the giant horns installed there 20 years earlier to resonate with the cliff opposite. Invited the previous year, i knew that playing there meant allowing oneself to be dispossessed (more than usual) of the sounds produced. It meant hearing them, almost watching them lose themselves in the mountain and return transformed: a few seconds of echoes and the sounds already belong to the valley.
The location was therefore conducive to listening to (and capturing) the musical with the environmental, without giving more value to one than the other. Without distinction: recording sounds constructed and amplified with the acoustics of the location (and its famous echoes), with the climate (the weather changes quickly in mountain, as we know), with animal presence (wild or domestic), with society (the valley is inhabited, overpopulated on the day of the festival), and through the technological filter (sensors that sometimes allow us to hear beyond the ear, but also their flaws, accidents)... The list is not exhaustive.

Deconstruction and reinterpretation are never absent from sound recording. Nor even from listening, in fact: we cut up and recompose our perception in reality. Here, this idea is therefore affirmed as a process. And the possibility (the one implicitly offered to festival listeners) of transforming the music in real time through walking and experiencing the landscape is defined as a method. The electroacoustic material that makes up (echoes) was collected from near, far, very far away, underwater, on resonant surfaces, through the ground... A random sound hike along the valley paths to find what sounds, how it sounds, how far it sounds.
Then came the time of composing in the studio, with its choices, its tricks, its recipes, its trials, and even its impasses. But that's not the most interesting part: it only served to bring out what was already contained in the recordings. [CD liner notes]

(The last image of the horm is borrowed from Seb Brun ©)