The mid-point of the festival will be marked with a concert special in our electrified world: it will be fully acoustic. The big hall formerly used as riding arena for the horses of the national gendarmerie school will be filled solely with the sound of the overtones of Madison Greenstone’s clarinet, Alexis Degrenier’s percussion instruments, and Gwendoline Robin’s self-built performance objects.
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exstatic resonances
exstatic resonances are wild acoustic phenomena created by indeterminacies within the clarinet’s timbre. Greenstone’s practice draws on a deep study of the polyphonic qualities of the clarinet, a traditionally monophonic instrument, and explores sonorities that sound outside of themselves, with highly spatial, sculptural, and disorienting qualities. They embrace difference tones, psychoacoustic phenomena, and all the unruly irreducibilities within the clarinet to create an acoustic identity that fractures its own singularity. With sustained circular breathing, they link a mysticism of repetition with the inherent variance latent therein.
Madison Greenstone is a clarinetist and improviser based between Berlin and Brooklyn. Their solo practice explores material and spatial expressivities of sustained sound through richly noisy timbral actions. Recently their work explores dreamlike acoustic mirages, spatial interferences of difference tones and beating, and draws inspiration from fiction writer Yoko Tawada’s proposition that there is no such thing as a room with a fixed size.
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Alexis Degrenier will use the space-constraint as an extension of his setup, specifically prepared for this performance. The period between two creations allows him to find interstices where other experiments and parameters can be explored. For this solo within a bare space and acoustic configuration, he seeks to inhabit the venue with tense threads, between ephemeral appearances and spectral disappearances. Degrenier thus combines his explorations of “…existing through absence…” and “…time overflowing…” as if music remains a memory of the future, a perpetual becoming.
Alexis Degrenier is a musician and composer living in Auvergne. His solo work focuses on polyrhythms and their expressive effects. Recent research for his future creations has led him to explore chaos itself and melancholy as possible sources of light. His instruments include suspended objects and percussion instruments that are blown, rubbed, struck or used as resonators.
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Coexistences #1
A performance inspired by moments of listening and observing in high mountain plateaus, hearing river waters, wind, landslides, marmot calls, and noticing changes of light and color on rocks and forest paths. The landscape’s power reveals itself through its transformations across different environments. Back in the studio, these experiences feed visual and sound installations made from elemental materials: clay, glass, stone, and wood. Their activation, in dialogue with the space, explores the balance between the ephemeral and the permanent, between solidity and collapse. A way to rediscover the pleasure of connecting with natural and constructed spaces through material, gesture, sound, and space.
Gwendoline Robin is a Belgian visual artist and performer based in Brussels. Her work, combining installation, performance, and video, explores the fragility and power of elements through ephemeral actions. Internationally active since 2005, she exhibits and performs across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. She also teaches at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Tournai and at ESA Le 75 in Brussels.
©Lukas Pürmayr
