compilation of experimental electronic music, focusing on the ambiguity between wildlife and synthesized sounds.
with the compositional efforts of :
Cabinet de minéralogie
Thierry Besche
Gildas Bouchaud
Augustin Soulard & Julien Ortuno
Ioa Beduneau
Yab
Jenny Abouav
Bertrand Fraysse
Abysmo
Lamina
Audrey Houdart

Graphisme : Mia Ftz (https://miaftzz.wordpress.com)
Mastering : bertrand Fraysse & ioa beduneau
Cassettes tapes here : https://hierophonie.bandcamp.com/album/mati-res-vivantes

Matières vivantes

It's the soundtrack to an imaginary story about the life of "micronecta poweri", a species of small aquatic insects found in stagnant and brackish waters.
A dreamlike fiction about this species and its environment, it is composed as much of hydrophone field recordings as of synthesized sounds.
Some sounds are transformed to accentuate the characteristics that struck me while listening in the field, while others strive to mimic their living examples to blend into the mass and guide the listener towards a narrative:
The listening point is in the middle of the aquatic micro-fauna of an awakening marsh, in the heat of an oppressive summer.
An impromptu flash of lightning causes something to fall into the water and shake the mass of the marsh. The tranquility of the population is disturbed, its activity densifies and the temperature climbs; atoms heat up, frenetic air bubbles and pockets of gas escape from beneath the mud, among which small insects collide in chaotic haste.
Aquatic plants generate fine, noisy bubbles through photosynthesis, then a short shower gently falls on this microcosm.
At last, a few electric toads are roused from their solar nap and a few insects are plunged into a spectral attitude, while strange planktons and other micro-shrimps slowly return to fill their little interstices;
So much so that she fades away, leaving here and there a few traces, fragile memories charged with doubt in the secret of the water.
In the end, what did I hear of my listening?

Ioa Beduneau - Micronecta poweri

We're trying to create a fabulation around a species, its environment and its expressions. We've mixed reality with narrative.
You could say that reality doesn't tell the story; things are there, perhaps in relation to each other.
Fabulation here means directing attention to what we don't necessarily hear, to what is "under" heard in this phonography.
In other words, how this species lives and breathes its environment beyond what we can perceive with our transducers (micro/ears), and what we can imagine of the "other" from human experience.

Julien Ortuno & Augustin Soulard - Umberligerus

In Plain, the sounds become bugs with acrid, surly vocals.
A chaotic, disordered, staggering abundance.
Everything tries to stand out, but nothing pierces.
It's a disorder without relief, almost smooth. We move forward with the certainty that nothing revolutionary will happen.

Gildas Bouchaud - Plain

Electronic music by Thierry Besche.
In the first phase of research, listening is all about the intrinsic musicality of naturalistic sounds. Analysis, observation and exploration of natural behaviors, and experimentation with electronic synthesis reveal sounds for themselves, not for what they represent.
Sometimes the electronic landscape appears so familiar to our ears that we think we recognize something familiar. Yet this composition is made exclusively with electronic sounds: Serge and Phénol analog synthesizers.
The regular iteration of a rolling grain or a filtered white noise, formed by the gesture that sculpts it, are characteristics also attributed to the cymbalization (singing) of a cicada or a thunderstorm that bursts.
Right from the start, the ear warns us of danger. The ear is alert. The ear collects, stores and memorizes sounds.
Language puts words to unknown things.
This is how humans tame their listening.
To each sound event that breaks the continuity of a background noise, the primary listener always seeks to attribute a meaning according to each person's experience and shared history of knowledge.
In this work, although reassured by a hypothetical recognition of sounds, the first listening becomes confused.
The certainty of a known world fades. Confusion between the true and the false sets in... It questions our way of hearing and understanding.
Kaleidoscopic listening is at work. The listener is free to choose her own way of hearing, and travels from a non-existent reality to all possible imaginings, awakening the sensibility of each individual in a multiplicity of perceptions.

Thierry Besche - Nature Electro #3

A landscape recreated from scratch from a moment spent listening and inventorying, it questions our relationship with memory through sound, and our ability to apprehend an ecosystem through the study of sound.
The abstract material represents a part of the ethereal atmosphere of this moment, like an attempt to retranscribe a state of mind provoked by the mutations of this environment.

Julien Ortuno & Augustin Soulard - Umberligerus

Hierophonie