after a long period spent in the electroacoustic universe, i return to recording saxophone and revisit live processing on a different system. over time, i recorded improvisations using a limited set of plug-ins to inspire a certain soundscape. the three voices correspond to three sound worlds and three types of plug-ins: spectral, granular and tonal.
with the saxophone, i explore abstract textures and sound techniques that can be found in free improv and contemporary music. but mostly, i replicate the fractal approach of this sonic explosion, and play with symmetrical shapes using a harmonic system i have been developing.
the last improvisation, in contrast is free from wild tweakery, and sits in the vast space of a gentle reverb. i am using a minor scale with major seven, a very powerful and dramatic colour used by ravi shankar in his ode to gandhi.
this album reflects some of the sounds and techniques i have been playing with. i hope you enjoy this journey…
i’ve been sitting on a bunch of tracks for a while that explored live processing. i was trying things out at the time i was working on the album ‘imploding stars’ and in that period, i was recording improvisations that used various sound sources and strings of plugins. lately, i revisited some of those pieces and did new edits and master. the album PLGD was released by Pan Y Rosas recently and already got some nice reviews.
here are a few words by s. victor aaron from something else:
“
Hervé Perez is both an audio artist and a visual artist but the sound art he makes tend to get deeply seared into your consciousness as provocative visual art would. PLGD is the last set of sonorities he’s created using is sax, his voice, electronic effects and Tibetan meditation bowls. The art is how all this disparate sources for sound converge to create an alien but liquid whole.
If you’re looking for harmony, melody or rhythm, this isn’t the place to look. Perez is going for something much more primal than that in the creation of these sound sculptures. Similar to the mission of conventional music though, it uses vibration to give your brain something striking and unfamiliar to process and ponder.
Processed field recordings seems to form the basis for PLGD’s opening salvo “Styfg,” where the sounds of nature are completely blended with otherworldly buzz. We hear Perez’s soprano saxophone for the first time on “Likabrd Inacag” but here it becomes the basis of an overall sonic painting made up of heavy processed sounds of that sax. “Winds of Many Harms” is the sound of flowing air, whether that’s through a heavily altered sax or by other means.
Those meditation bowls hums and chimes on “Lance L’eau Du Lac” are ancient timbres that never sound stale, and if you never heard these resonant instruments from the Himalayas, you’re in for a treat.
Perez take his sax to new, exotic places on “Winds and Humming Buds,” at times making his horn resemble a flute. For “Par Anneaux,” he dubs over his sax several times to make it resemble a flock of geese that over time gets enmeshed into a larger tapestry of dreary sonorities. The sax becomes a percussion instrument during much of “Il Faudrait Qu’on Cesse,” spraying into the void a barrage of false notes.
“Bird in a Bush” uses silence as another instrument, occasionally interrupted by rustling, the bowls, percussive knocks and a barely-perceptible low hum. “Styfg Coda” roughly approximates the distorted sound of storm waves crashing onshore and “Soprano Fields” transits from near-silence to ghoulish to placid.
Hervé Perez makes musique concrète using atypical sources while audaciously pushing his soprano saxophone into uncharted territory. That’s why PLGD is made for ears thirsty for entirely new sounds, even for those ears who think they’ve heard it all.
is a journey into space, a weather check on the nature of constellations, planets and stars, or is it atoms and particles? Same difference. With titles like ‘waiting for space to expand’ and its mirror image ‘waiting for space to contract’, it becomes obvious that we are considering timelines so large that they are difficult to comprehend. And so it is with the size of those compounded-constellations of sounds, it is difficult to tell what we are looking at (or hearing). It feels a bit like the type of abstract art photography that blurs perspective and one wonders if they are looking are a macro landscape or the micro world.
This music is like fractals.
In Buddhist teachings you can find comments on notions of endless time or space. This culture worked with a sense of time, periods like kalpas, that are hard to even grasp (time stretches that cover appearance and disappearance of entire universes). Similarly with scale, there is this understanding that everything is empty of inherent existence and you can analyse any ‘thing’ that comes into existence down to its basic components and the conditions by which it came into being – there is no such a thing as a permanent, unchanging entity.
But it does not stop here. Even atoms and particles are compounds and one could, given the ability to perceive such things, keep going smaller still into other realms of existence, into a universe of vibrations so ‘small’ that no one can actually even consider, let alone measure. In line with buddhist teachings that are 2500 years old, quantum science is now considering fields that act as a matrix for the arising of material forms, and inform the nature of compounded vibrations. All is energy.
The music here gives the impression that we are taken on a journey into the micro realm, with sound processing like granulation taking the ear into increasing smaller fragments until the point of origin, the first sound that is the breath, has been completely deconstructed and nothing remains but the ghost of a sound, to the point of near silence.
Or is it? Are there other realms to explore further? Even points of silence retain a certain tension, or expectation, as if one is suspended in space.
This is a concept album with a coherence of sound and approach, and if you willingly engage with the work and let yourself be drawn into its universe, the bulk of its 78 minutes may appear just like the blink of an eye. But reflecting on buddhist practice, you have to let go of the self and dive in. Let the change happen, and with such a journey into the very matter, the nature of things, one cannot remain unchanged.
If this were a collaboration between a saxophonist and a digital artist doing various manipulations, this work would be easier to understand, but it would not be the same of course. Here though, the same artist does both, live in the studio, in real time, compromising the instrument and extended techniques (and all the research into the instrument, control and hours of work that this implies) and surrenders to the sound of strings of plug-ins (yes, the scientific metaphor can run all the way… fractals, remember?). Rather than having a saxophonist and electronic artist performing their best licks, what you have is an instrumentation that becomes transparent and lets the concept, the singular sonic identity of the work come to the fore.
Entire musical world-systems collide, improv jazz, electroacoustic and experimental electronics, new music, contemporary and its minimal spectral approaches and so on. If this work was placed in a different context, with an accompanying band, the correlation to modern jazz such as the Norwegian cool, with added electronics to stripped down harmonic contents and fragile melody, would be clearer. But in this case, the work is very hard to classify. Perhaps it is the whole point to not reduce this entire scientific enquiry to a musical style. Because you know that this came out of the mind of one person, you can relate with its uniqueness as a deliberate positioning. There is a sense of an intention to make this a listening experience and not another ‘improv’ ‘jazz’ or ‘electronic’ album.
The work on the saxophone is mostly extended techniques, sounds peripheral to the instrument; and although some notes can be heard at times, most of the sounds you’ll hear from the saxophone are stripped down to the basis of breath and overtones that derive from its flow.
This essential material of breath becomes metaphorical for the most essential material that exists; it is like prana or qi that infuses life into the all. And ensues a series of pieces with a common theme around space, the universe.
Out of emptiness, vibrations. Then particles of sounds are created. The album takes you through world systems and different universes, some more or less populated and dense, some very minimal where everything is fragile and impermanent.
The processing is multi-layered: computer-based manipulations such as granulation, spectral processing and synthesis retain essential aspects of the original sound, but also multiply, sculpt and transform the results in unexpected ways. And because a number of tools are at work at all times, it is hard to tell exactly what is the result of what effect – reality is never all that it seems. The processing itself is also compounded – a construct with ever changing combinations that give the character to its own sonic architecture. And the origin, the conditions by which what we hear arises is very hard to perceive. We just have to go with what is and enter its realm in order to feel the very nature of things.
This is a very unique listening experience and the use of headphones is highly recommended as one enters into this ‘other’ sonic reality. For sure, this is not background entertainment, and it will take some commitment or listening attention. Just like the cinema is designed to remove people from mundane reality and place them into a controlled environment for optimum experience, suspend disbelief and become wrapped into a story, here too, if one enters this sound world and let go, follow the journey that is presented, with open mind, the rewards will be great.
“An excellent and ingenuous musician Perez is an authentic master of his instruments, which he builds into sequences of impure electroacoustic processing then allowing himself episodes of sparse noise and endless ventures into the almost inaudible.”
Giuseppe Aiello, Blow Up 05.19
Imploding Stars is a series of improvisations on soprano saxophone with live processing, using a range of plug-ins to manipulate the sound of the saxophone, cut fragments and explode them into nebulae of sounds.
The work on the saxophone is mostly extended techniques, sounds peripheral to the instrument; and although some notes can be heard at times, most of the noises you’ll hear from the saxophone is stripped down to the basis of breath and some overtones.
This essential material of breath becomes metaphorical for the most essential material that exists; and ensues a series of pieces with a common theme around space, the universe. So as my first solo CD, the process of recording this becomes an act of creation with the breath as its beginning.
Out of emptiness, vibrations. Then particles of sounds are created and the rest is history. The album takes you through world systems and different universes, some more or less populated and dense, some very minimal. Each track has a different approach and treatment of the sax, and I hope you’ll find that is a sonic treat with surprising variations along the way.
I am very grateful to Andy at Focused Silence who supported me with this release. You can listen to tracks on bandcamp, while the CD is available from the label’s website.
Multi-instrumentistes, ils sculptent des idiomes imaginaires de forme acoustique et électronique, à la croisée du jazz et de l’expérimental.
Ecart de Sons
Le duo Ecart de Sons offre un dialogue d’affinités musicales et poétiques de deux personnalités expérimentées dont la vocation est l’expressivité concertée.
Le désir de parfaire ce duo prend corps au cours des années, et évolue selon la recherche de chaque musicien. Cette rencontre s’illustre dans la pratique de l’improvisation libre et des musiques intuitives et nouvelles, dont les bases convoquent: des développement jazz ou free, des idiomes imaginaires, des échos de la musique contemporaine et de l’électro-acoustique.
Nous continuons cette collaboration en adaptant notre discours selon les changements imposés par la distance. Ce projet vois le jour en prenant la marque de la technologie. Echange de fichiers, sculpture numérique et arrangements d’instruments acoustiques et électroniques qui se fondent dans la texture de prises de sons.
L’échange musical spontané, toujours present, prends une ampleur autre, et plonge dans l’abstractions de bruits élementaires, des excursions bucoliques et jouant d’une l’harmonie étendue de la modalité contemporaine.
Nous sommes à la recherche de labels aventureux, qui seraient ouverts au marriage de styles:
du jazz à l’improvisation, de l’électroacoustique au bruitisme experimental
Le duo Ecart de Sons offre un dialogue d’affinités musicales et poétiques de deux personnalités expérimentées dont la vocation est l’expressivité concertée.
Le parcours individuel de chaque musicien, riche de collaborations diverses est ponctué de nombreux concerts, d’enregistrements et compositions.
Le désir de parfaire ce duo prend corps au cours des années, et évolue selon la recherche de chaque musicien. Cette rencontre s’illustre dans la pratique de l’improvisation libre et des musiques intuitives et nouvelles, dont les bases convoquent: des développement jazz ou free, des idiomes imaginaires, des échos de la musique contemporaine et de l’electro-acoustique.
Musicien autodidacte, auteur de texte, il est attiré par la maîtrise du langage de divers instruments: piano, clavier, trombone, mélodica, percussion, Valiha Malgache.
Une orientation marquée par les rencontres d’improvisation avec lecteurs, poètes, musiciens, danseurs, peintres, performeurs. Engagé dans les courants d’échanges spontanés, de rencontres croisées. Il revendique le développement des arts et de la culture en tant que valeurs aidant la personne à mieux comprendre le monde, choisir leurs mode de pensée et de vie en toute connaissance et liberté.
Il participe et organise de nombreux événements sur les scènes régionales de la musique improvisée. Participe aux ateliers de l’IREA, aux Sonofages, intervient aux «Nuits de Lauzerte» dans une performance «Passages croisés». Concepteur des journées de musique intuitives, des concerts rue des fleurs.
Il sort en mai 2015 un CD solo, Roule ta Salive chez Improvising Beings. Un travail qu’il présente au théâtre du pavé.
Sur son trajet, il croise nombreux musiciens:
Didier Laserre , Nuch Werchowska, Le Fil, Grand Piac, Zoubooo, Synapsis, Gilles Dalbis, Naoto Yamagishi, Laurent Rodriguez, Heddy Boubaker
Participant actif sur la scène Européenne depuis 2000, en collaboration avec d’autres formes artistiques tel la danse, l’art visuel et l’écriture, il s’intéresse principalement aux modalités d’improvisation et aux relations entre musiciens, audience et environnement.
Travaille dans différentes formations de free jazz et d’improvisation libre, électroacoustique et musique contemporaine, ainsi qu’en performances solo. Il présente aussi son travail audio-visuel en installations in situ.
Il poursuis une recherche du son et sciences vibratoires d’une part, et aussi développe une approche très contemporaine de l’harmonie et de la mélodie. Inspiré de techniques anciennes de guérison et par la pratique de la méditation, il intègre science et spiritualité au sein de modalités de performance de la composition spontanée.
Le travail sur la résonance, la relation des formes vibratoires à l’architecture et au corps, la pratique du deep listening font alors partie intégrante du processus créatif qu’il chemine hors des enceintes stylistiques.
the duo live on opposite sides of the world and started working together through the networked music ensemble ethernet orchestra.
roger and hervé developed a strong working rapport based on common aesthetic and approach. they have become nada as a realisation of their unique collaboration.
the duo explores an area between jazz and electroacoustic music, taking influences from scandinavian new jazz, ethnic musics from asia, and acoustic ecology… both rooted in the use of technology and in traditional forms, the music has a deep respect for space and silence.
central to nada’s improvisations are ideas of deep listening, the japanese concept of Ma and meditations on silence from buddhist traditions which gave rise to the group’s name.
while on tour in Germany in November 2014 the duo documented performance and residency research with both roger and hervé playing acoustic instruments, in the same room, for the first time. these recordings have been issued as nada’s first release ‘mirror image’, by netlabel Linear Obsessional.
audio documents:
01 [07’38]
02 [11’34]
03 [05’28]
04 [04’36]
05 [04’06]
06 [08’40]
edits from networked improvisations recorded ‘live’ over the internet.
biography:
roger mills
Internationally acclaimed trumpeter, composer and sound artist working in the field of experimental and improvised music and sound.
He is founder of the tele-improvisatory ensemble Ethernet Orchestra who perform to co-located and networked audiences through the Internet.
While he is now based in Sydney, Australia, Roger spent most of the 1990s in the UK recording and performing with Bristol trip hoppers Statik Sound System, and the free jazz ensemble Spaceways.
His methodology focuses on breath and extended techniques with an attention to timbre in slow evolutionary loops and drones.
Sound artist/composer/performer from France, now based in Sheffield, UK.
Hervé has been composing music and performing live around europe for 20 years. Playing solo and in various groups, he draws from jazz, electro-acoustic, contemporary music, experimental electronics, free improvisation, immersive sound art and ancient techniques of sound therapy alike.
His research approaches sound as vibration, the relation between sound and objects or spaces, architecture and the body.
On the soprano saxophone, Hervé focuses on extended techniques and abstract peripheral sounds structural to the instrument as a physical resonant object. His work on alto merges traditional and jazz harmonic approaches with extended techniques and multiphonics.
nexttime studio 