¡Viernes de sonidos en Ficción de la razón! Presentamos el álbum Closing Our Eyes del compositor Philippe Petit. Una sonoridad muy especial, cautivante, que hace jugar grabaciones de objetos con electrónica, salterión eléctrico,daxofón, sintetizador y piano preparado. Creando formas sonoras de gran belleza, a veces con repeticiones simples, pero nunca evidentes en su continuidad, Petit nos entrega este enorme trabajo de composición y encuentro con objetos sonoros. ¡A escuchar!
Philippe Petit‘s Closing Our Eyes, released on the consistently boundary-pushing Portuguese label Crónica, is a fun, light-hearted yet adventurous dive into the world of sonic abstraction. While it channels the spirit of early electronic pioneers—Raymond Scott, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Henry, and especially the often-overlooked Todd Dockstader (and that’s a high compliment)—this album is no dry academic exercise. It’s alive with playfulness, curiosity, and the thrill of discovery.
At its core, Closing Our Eyes is an acoustic transformation through electronics—organic sound is deconstructed, reshaped, and reanimated into something beautifully unclassifiable. Petit doesn’t just manipulate sounds; he creates and modifies them with intent, developing a new reflection of musical language that escapes conventional stylistic limitations. What emerges is an electroacoustic narrative that stimulates the imagination while tickling the ears.
Each track unfolds like a miniature sonic diorama, bustling with unexpected turns and mischievous textures. There are echoes of tape music’s golden era here, but Petit uses those tools not as relics, but as launchpads for something new. Think Dockstader with a smile, or a dreamier take on the Radiophonic Workshop—an exploration that’s at once cerebral and charming.
In short, Closing Our Eyes is musically stimulating without ever taking itself too seriously. It’s a captivating listen for seasoned fans of experimental music and curious newcomers alike—an artful reminder that the avant-garde can still be fun.
Aida was created as a ten-channel soundtrack for the exhibition Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Manga, Anime, and Sūpā Furatto in the 20th and 21st Centuries (curated by dr. Arūnas Gelūnas, architecture by Išora x Lozuraitytė Studio, lighting by Eugenijus Sabaliauskas, sound engineering by Vytautas Narbutas) which took place in the National Gallery of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art between July and October of 2024.
This soundtrack consists of music played on various Japanese synthesizers, multi-tracked together with manipulated field recordings of Tokyo’s urban ambiences recorded by Viktorija Makauskaitė (who relocated from Vilnius to Japan in 2009). The title of this continuous, almost three-hour-long spatial sound work is aida which in Japanese means “the space between things” or simply “between”. In Lithuanian, “aida” is the feminine form of the noun “echo”.
In the vast space of the exhibition hall this soundtrack was played on a very low volume, barely detectable by the visitors, who mainly reported that the sensation of the sound’s presence was something of a ghostly emanation from the visual artworks on display. During the opening of the exhibition, the chatter of the crowd completely absorbed the soundtrack, once again raising the question of functionality of the accessory sound design in a visual art show.
Aida is now available to stream or download from Crónica.
Crónica is a Portuguese label with loads of highly experimental or conceptual releases. This one, “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” by Russian Ilia Belorukov, is highly conceptual. Because of that, I listened to this one several times because I didn’t feel anything, but I did think a lot. And with the whole thinking versus feeling, I sometimes have a bit of a problem. But did I have that problem this time is what you’re wondering … Well, to make a long story short: It was a matter of volume to get the real beauty of this album out. And I suspect that it is precisely what Ilia tried with this. The Nord Drum Two is a drum machine from Clavia, and as with all of Clavia’s machines, it’s red. And it has a synthetic way of generating sounds, so no samples form the basics of what you hear. On this album, where NRD DRM TWO refers to this exact machine, Ilia made single-step sequences with which he triggered the machine, and the output was manipulated and recorded. As well as some manipulation afterwards. So no, you will not hear complex drum patterns, and if that is what you are looking for, better skip this album. The beauty in this album is the sound itself. The interpolation of the waves generated by the synthesis engine, the patterns evolving of the concrete sounds, and the manipulation flow afterwards. The complexity of the minimalism of just sounds. Because, well, if you have a particular sound and repeat it in 120 BPM, do you have a sequence? Or do you have a sound with a fundamental frequency of 120 Hz, but with a waveform so complex that tuning and twisting that waveform generates some kind of rudimentary drones? That is the quest Ilia Belorukov, who lives and works out of Novi Sad in Serbia, went on between 2022 and 2024. And this CD is the result of said quest. As mentioned before, highly conceptual in its approach and maybe more of an advertisement for the Clavia Drum than an album to listen to and relax. But believe me, when I say that many layers underneath the obvious make this an album worth exploring. Like Ilia did. PS: No rings were harmed or thrown into volcanoes during the quest. (BW)
“Closing Our Eyes” is like a sonic invitation to shut out the chaos and embark on an inner voyage – a carefully architected journey where the tactile and the spectral meet. In this album, Philippe Petit, a seasoned experimenter whose career spans DJing, zine editing, and even running his own label, channels his boundless curiosity into a series of compositions that blur the lines between the acoustic and the electronic.
Across eleven parts, Petit uses prepared piano, tape manipulation, and an assortment of vintage and modular synthesizers to create a soundscape that is at once methodical and delightfully unpredictable. The music draws inspiration from celestial themes such as the Eternal Return and the mystical allure of unseen realms, echoing the spirit of his earlier work on Dante’s Divine Comedy without becoming overtly didactic. Instead, the album gently prods the listener to visualize unseen landscapes by simply closing their eyes – a subtle cue that invites introspection and reverie.
Petit’s approach is deeply personal yet playfully irreverent. There is a raw honesty in the way he layers organic instrument tones with the uncanny shimmer of electronic effects, creating passages that feel like quiet conversations in the dark. At times, the album surfaces with moments of stark minimalism – evoking the vulnerability of a solitary breath in an endless void – while at other moments it bursts into textured clusters reminiscent of a vibrant inner carnival.
Tracing his roots from Marseille to his current eclectic milieu, Petit’s musical vocabulary has evolved to embrace both a profound reverence for tradition and an untamed desire for innovation. “Closing Our Eyes” is a testament to that duality – a delicate balance between seeking solace in remembered sounds and venturing boldly into undiscovered territories of sonic expression. It’s both a meditation on the quiet power of introspection and a playful nod to the unpredictable nature of creativity itself.
In short, if you ever felt that the everyday world was too noisy and predictable, let “Closing Our Eyes” be your escape – a momentary passage into the unexpected, where every sound is a revelation waiting to be felt. Vito Camarretta
Of het nu 1 april was of niet, de veelzijdige kunstenaar Philippe Petit eiste onze aandacht op met zijn eclectische album Closing Our Eyes.
Net zoals veel van zijn werk is ook dit album een niet voor de hand liggende verzameling nummers die elektronica en akoestische speelsheid met elkaar vermengen. Ooit journalist, dj, de bezieler van de twee uitermate interessante labels BiP_HOp en Pandemonium en ondertussen afgestudeerd in de elektroakoestische muziek in Marseille, is elke plaat een veelzijdige oefening in de verbeeldingskracht van muzikant en luisteraar.
Het kan altijd alle kanten uit met Petit, dat getuigt ook de indrukwekkende lijst van mensen met wie hij eerder al samenwerkte. We denken meteen aan Lydia Lunch, Eugene S. Robinson(meerdere keren), Asva en Simon Fisher Turner. We mogen ook zijn ambitieuze trilogie Extraordinary Tales Of A Lemon Girl en het al net zo impressionante trilogie A Reassuring Elsewhere niet over het hoofd zien.
Elf nummers bevat Closing Our Eyes, elf nummers die telkens helemaal anders klinken maar uitblinken in vindingrijkheid en speelsheid. Een joie de vivre op een niveau dat alleen met zeer veel fantasie tot een onvoorstelbaar palet aan klanken leidt waardoor we geboeid moeten luisteren om niets te missen. Elk geluidje heeft betekenis binnen het grotere geheel, of het nu een pianotoets, een geschraap met een prul, een gevonden geluid of een daxofoon (een experimenteel muziekinstrument uitgevonden door Hans Reichel) is.
We wisten dat Petit geen grenzen respecteert en eindeloos blijft zoeken naar zijn eigen creatieve klankenwereld. Dat hadden we op een stel eerdere releases die we hier in het rek hebben steken al gemerkt en dat bewijst hij nog meer dan eerder eigenlijk op deze plaat. En neen, het is geen aprilvis, zelfs niet eentje van chocolade.
Closing Our Eyes is a series of compositions that invite the listener-spectator to find a place of interiority, a sonic journey that conjures up images and imaginary signs in perpetual change to create the possibility of pushing the imagination further, to express a visual fantasy. This could have been the imaginary soundtrack of a film that only exists on the spur of listening… You can only see the images by closing your eyes?!
Following his soundtrack to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Closing Our Eyes is pushing further the marriage of electronic and acoustic. From his early works recontextualizing Mahler’s first symphony, Cordophony, giving priority to sounds coming from the vibrations of one or several strings, or The Extraordinary Tales of a Lemon Girl and A Reassuring Elsewhere trilogies, Petit is always showing extreme respect to the acoustic material, keeping it fresh, accentuating the relief and depth of the noble sound-material.
This collection of pieces conjures images, mental and emotional pictures of events, scenes and moods, bringing a new palette of sounds with a vast array of inside-piano, tape manipulations, percussive instruments and modular synthesisers played in creative and unconventional ways. Organising sounds in search of sensation may be a powerful image stimulus; a new art of sound may perhaps prod our psychological forces into creating new dimensions of experience.
Acoustic transformation through electronics is musically stimulating, creating and modifying sounds, developing a new reflection of the musical language which could escape conventional stylistic limitations.
It could, though should it?
Petit is happy to keep his music in motion, natural, visceral, while being playful!
Closing Our Eyes is now available as a limited-release CD, stream or download.
