In 2024, I travelled to France to study Bouffon (a type of clowning) at École Philippe Gaulier. I am a musician/composer and did this to improve my stage presence, but I learned much more than I had bargained for...

The course was incredibly intense and all-consuming. However, I did find time to record a lot of 'Bouffon' sounds - laughter, giggles, swearing, shouting, and other strange noises. A central part of Bouffon practice is to mock and parody people you hate. Hence, towards the end of the course, I made a short theatre piece about frogs based upon an infamous Alex Jones quotation 'I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin' frogs gay!' To support me, all of my classmates pretended to be frogs engaging in... er.... intimate acts. The theatre piece was a glorious failure, but inspired Frog Buffoons.

Frog Buffoons features an electronics part that combines the Bouffon audio with frog sounds in addition to the noises produced by a French frog children's toy. It is a very strange piece, but the Bouffon course was a very strange experience.

The fixed electronics part is improvisatory in nature, in that the source sounds are recordings of me and my classmates improvising. However, the way in which I used these recordings was also improvisatory; once I had placed a recording into my Digital Audio Workstation, I did not allow myself to delete it. I had to use it and make it work via processing and recontextualising. Finally, the live melodica part (which I play myself) is entirely improvised.

Frog Buffoons

Ben Gaunt