for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

**********************

Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

Pensées

The Things You Need

Aude Falgairette (voc), Jean-Marc Herbreteau (kb, prg)
http://bluemintcookie.fr

The Masters

Low-fi delirium for alto flute, bass clarinet, vibraphone and electronics
Daniel Alvarado Bonilla - 2022
Œuvre commandée par l'Ensemble Sillages et l'Ensemble der/gelbe/klang, avec le soutien du Ministère de la Culture - DRAC Bretagne. 

Julie Brunet-Jailly - alto flute
Hugo Clédat - bass clarinet
Jean-Baptiste Bonnard - vibraphone

Recorded by engineer Alexandre Chaigne at Music Unit Studios (Montreuil, France)

In Low-fi Delirium, most of the electronics consist of sounds that come from real "vintage" keyboard instruments such as the mellotron, the optigan and the Rhodes electric piano. In some ways this piece pays homage to the psychedelic music and delirious times of the sixties. 

The sounds of these analog instruments have always inspired me since I was a teenager and I have always thought of using them outside of their usual musical context (that of rock, pop or jazz). Although nowadays there are very powerful digital keyboards and softwares created to simulate these instruments, there is nothing, in my opinion, like the real machines – with their charming flaws and their analog sound qualities. The mellotron is an instrument in which each key triggers the playback of a magnetic tape which contains a real pre-recorded instrumental sound. It is in a way the analog ancestor of the digital sampler. The mellotron's pre-recorded sounds have a rudimentary "cheap" and almost “kitsch” sound quality. It is precisely this characteristic which, in my opinion, gives the mellotron its charm and potential! I wanted to use these sounds in order to establish an interaction, a dialog with the three acoustic instruments. This is how each instrument of the ensemble will be enlarged by its mirror or by its "low-fi" electronic alter ego. The pre-recorded mellotron sounds will be the electronic doubles of the wind instruments, while the bell or celesta type sounds of the Rhodes will weave a link with the vibraphone. Alongside these electronic instrumental sounds there are other “vintage” and “concrete” vinyl crackle noises, old clocks ticking, radio interferences...

Low-fi delirium

Extraits du nouvel album du groupe Panam Panic nommé "The Black Monk"  qui sortira le 14/09/2015 chez Musicast

Extracts from the new album of Panam Panic called "The Black Monk" , out the 14th of september 2015



01 The Black Monk extrait

Auteur - Compositeur : Cherif Mbaw 
Arrangeur : Philippe Collas
Batterie : Mogan Cornebert - Basse : Olivier Carole - Guitares : Philippe Odje - Claviers : Philippe Collas
Mastering : Mark Haliday / Custom Studio
℗ Planet Mix 2015
© Studio d'IKKEN 2015

Cherif MBaw - Touki Bouki

Test of Nada Brahma / Neumann U87 / AKG C411 for a record with Laurent Sureau on Rav Vast.

Recorded with a Millennia HV3-C at 96kHz/24Bits.

LaurentSureau RAV C411

Rauni - Sa ki Taw (extrait, non mixé)

Olivier Carole : basse/voix
Yacine Aït Amer : Guitare/voix
Laurent Sureau : balafons/vibra/voix
Emma Hocquellet : claviers/choeurs
Sabrina Calvo : percus/choeurs
Mogan Cornebert : batterie

Enregistré au Master Studio par Thierry Chassang

Rauni - Sa ki Taw (extrait, non mixé)

Recorded live in Broceliande forest by Alexandre Chaigne, 06/17.
Val sans Retour.

LaurentSureau RAV C411

Alexandre Chaigne

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