sonic translations of Volume Magazine (2015)
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
→ Volume
Essay by Christophe Gallois:
When Sébastien Roux was invited to respond to the six issues of the contemporary art review about sound Volume published between 2010 and 2013, by “replaying” them in an audio form, he chose to use their very essence as a work tool: the words, the texts that they comprise. In keeping with several of his previous projects, starting with the radio piece Nouvelle (2012), created from the descriptions and sonic evocations that punctuate Flaubert’s Legend of Saint-Julian the Hospitaller, and the installation Inevitable Music (2013), in which he converted to music several of the instructions that American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s gave for his wall drawings, he initiated the creative process by using an external object as a starting point, shifting it toward the field of music by approaching it as a score. He employs the term “translation” to qualify this kind of conversion of an existing work of art or literature to a piece of music, and in doing so stresses the importance of the choices, interpretations, and alterations that he makes along the way. Somewhere beneath this process lies the will to move music away from its usual frame of reference, to take it across new thresholds, to confront it with seemingly different domains, to find out what specific products of literature, visual arts or, as is the case here, artistic comment, can trigger when introduced in the field of music. At the start of each project lies the intuition that such and such a text, or work of art, potentially contains music. Like a water dowser, Sébastien Roux wanders around with his composer’s rod: “There’s music underneath,” he seems to say every time he takes an interest in a new object.
As a result, the six pieces on this record are the fruit of a direct study of the critical texts – articles and interviews – published in Volume. They all have in common the preliminary use of a series of keywords that relate to the fields of sound and music – “acoustic,” “noise,” “singing,” “echo,” frequency,” “talk,” or “silence,” for instance – applied as filters, prisms through which to comprehend the review, thus revealing the essential position of sounds therein, but also the variety of practices that it addresses and, in fine, its eminently musical dimension. In the process that led to their creation, only the occurrences of these terms in each of the articles were taken into consideration, as well as the words directly before or after. This first step is more of a collecting stage – expressions like “literal silence” or “sampled voices” coexist alongside fragments of sentences such as “strange phonemes or rhythms unknown to the ear” or “sound has an impact.” These groups of words remain in their original position on the page but are now surrounded by emptiness – the rest of the text having been concealed – and trace a constellation reminiscent of the one Mallarmé deployed at the end of the 19th century in his poem A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. In this case as in the latter, the space between words suggests the movements of the mind.
Once he put together these “scores”, Sébastien Roux proceeded to make specific choices for each of his six pieces. For instance, issues 1 and 6 of the review were approached as a whole, the first by articulating the different resulting scores through a cut-up process, the second by superimposing them like layers of sound, whereas the intermediary publications led to propositions that center on a number of specific texts – Daniele Balit’s article on Anthony McCall (#2), Florence Ostende’s on Susan Hiller (#3), Kathy Alliou’s interview of Pierre Henry (#4), or Manon Gingold’s essay on Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (#5) – and make use of various musical approaches: field recording, sung or spoken interpretations, etc. What emerges from these compositions is the musical adaptation of the very movements of the reading process: its temporality, its montages, its silences, its intensities, its density peaks, and its decelerations.
Beyond his interpretation of Volume, Sébastien Roux also uses sonic elements from the texts – themselves the products of observation and listening – to invite us to reflect on the notions of process and relationship to sounds. This may be seen as an indirect way of calling into question the excessive primacy that electroacoustic music sometimes gives to sound at the expense of form, since the infinity of possibilities might place the subjectivity of the creator in a hegemonic posture. Faced with this danger, Sébastien Roux affirms the potential that constraint, procedure, and constructing from a given material provide. His work balances on the fragile, thin, and subtle line between the will to embrace the whole field of possibilities and that of trying not to place itself outside or above this field, but rather at the heart of it. John Cage described this line in his own way when, in one of his memorable phrases, he made the assumption of a “purposeful purposelessness”.
In its most interesting occurrences, the use of a process does not pertain to systematic thought, but rather to faith in anything unexpected, unsuspected, unpredictable, or “unheard of ” it might generate. This is, against any superficial interpretation of his work, what Sol LeWitt never ceased to assert, and which
his wall drawings embody magnificently; as always, although the procedures are laid out precisely before- hand, neither the artist nor the viewer can anticipate the results. This is also what a composer like Steve Reich suggested when he commented on the “musical process” that determined his early works: “What I wanted to do was to come up with a piece of music that was completely, personal, exactly what I wanted in every detail, but that was arrived at by an impersonal means.”
The six pieces that Sébastien Roux composed based on Volume belong to the same category: both impersonal and intensely personal.