This project took place in Cholet (in the Maine-et-Loire department, France) between 2008 and 2014, associating an artist, Mathias Delplanque, with students in a technical school there. Some of the sounds were recorded in the local textile museum (Cholet has a tradition in this industry, specifically in the making of handkerchiefs). Resonances and rhythmic regularity are what we hear first, through large movements and tiny punctuation, chimes/ signals and implacable clocklike beats, but nothing like your usual monster industrial music (cf. Futurists’ dreams re-loaded). The successive tracks display a large range in the noises collected and organized, sounds within which you never drown : room is made for short breaks, distance, silence, tiny details, coming and going action.
There are intros, outros (slow dying before motion stops), voices (of mechanical sources) emerging and vanishing again, space!
The audio results generally sound very smooth, indeed. Undeniably object music, machine music (though not “metal, rather wood), thing music. Which is just contradicted by the last track : a lengthy, wooly, ghostly exit without angles or edges, widespread as in slow motion, endless. Above “poetryâ€, it is just the (unasked for) audible proof that machines at work can make original art pieces, like music, for instance.
Hazel Lee