Notes from INA-GRM no 9118 mi: MION Born 1956, Seine et Marne, France. Opts for composition in 1978 after taking the electroacoustic composition class (P. Schaeffer, G. Reibel) at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, Paris. Has taken no active part in musical research at the GRM since 1977. His various musical activities include: electroacoustic concerts, teaching electroacoustics, music appreciation. He has composed acousmatic works, instrumental works, ballet music, etc. Member of the Ensemble Instrumental Electroacoustique TM+ and of QUARK (composers collective). Dedicated to Henri MICHAUX, after "Appearance-Disappearances" by Henri MICHAUX. An excerpt of "MOMENTS" (Editions GALLIMARD). Commisioned by INA.GRM. Realized in the studios of G R M: analog studio 116, digital studio 123. Created: PARIS. CYCLE ACOUSMATIQUE 1984, Monday, 26 March. Maison de Radio France. Voice: Harin de CHARETTE Thanks to: Christian ZSNESI, for the vocal sound recordings; Bénéâict MAILLIARD and Yann GESLIN, who were my advisers in the digital studio; Monsieur HUGUES, (Galerie Point Cardinal) There is no break between Part 1 and Part 2. The times given below are merely for reference. The excerpts and texts referred to are in no way titles of movements. Recommendation: please listen to this record fortissimo. Side 1 Introduction 2'10 . Tirs 3'35 . Un homme debout dans un coin de la chambre 5 '48 . Sabotages 7'17 . La musique que j'écoute... 9'04 . Dommages - allongement - accroissement 10'55 . ... les femmes se changent en salamandres 14'21 . Est-ce là l'état d'innocence 17'00 . Dissolution 18'00 . Lire, le sens sommeil 19'06 . Interceptions (2ème) 20'16 . Espace 24'45 . Pensée... cicatrice 26'36 . Ah! tous ces virages Side 2 0 1'40 . Les causes, les conséquences 4'00 . Obnubi'iation 6'47 . Ramakrishna en personne est ici. 9'00 . La pensée, c'est une image éconduite 12'00 . Voix en promenade 14'00 . Enjambements 17'28 . Baratte 19-30 . Dilataste cor meum 21'00 . Un pouls nouveau 23'30 . Etendue 26'00 . Persuasion 27'11 . Ce que j'aperçois This piece was modified and shortened for the present edition. Side 1: 28' 10 - Side 2: 28' 50 - (stereo 2 tracks) - (Initial Duration: 70' - 4 tracks) What strikes one in THE AVERTED IMAGE is its luxuriance, its teeming baroque superabundant lushness. The bounty of ideas and artifacts. The coolie's labor of reaching out to the other : the listener left speechless, fulfilled. On the emotional level as well as on the level of the ear's comfort (the spaciousness! the legibility!) Mion lavishes an activism of details, a tendency to "spread it on" thickly; he transports the listener to a wondrous, anguishing, sensuous territory... He excites fantasies and stirs up the inner life of dreams, of the senses. And so, from the wide-angle view down to the microscopic glimpse, he is able to give us a perpetual craftsmanlike delight in the instant. But also a river current (with the initial giant setting-in-motion), a morbid intimisme, a grand adventure; and humor too, beneath the emphases, the stressfulness, the introspectiveness. Yet this juvenile enthusiasm of his has a classical dryness. It appears to combine (especially in the beginning) a lofty formalism with the paradoxical integrity of uncompromising deliriums (and it is a wonder how they can combine with art). Like Henri Michaux's work, his music is often poised between the hyperlyrical and the understated, excessiveness and abstinence. Then too the way crude or refined ideas manifest themselves with a sharp formal detachment seared on the eager young flames of a watchful superego recalls Pierre Henry. (In this connection I can't help discerning a few "cultural" allusions, which the listener will experience as an added pleasure. What I like particularly in the interval between anxiety and daring is the ineluctable dialogue with the genre's leading ancient and classical exponents). A French garden, then, but at night. Something strange glowing in the moonlight. Terracotta dryads trembling under a caress, and in a flash the bolt-out-of-the-blue opening (the double-exposure of the daily, an often repeated image : 24'45, Side 1) drops head down through winged kilometers of vertigo; the whole work turned inside-out like a glove, glimpsed backward like a life perhaps in Death's black hole (9', Side 2). A few singular or farcical ideas to adequately illustrate Henri Michaux's rough-textured words. Especially this : "The new life of the tactile", the ear's tactility. Summoned forth from time to time by aberrations of electronics, of computer science... and placed in the service of the most solemn incantations. And speaking of aberrations, observe how the baroque efflorescences cluster mainly around the narrating voice. "Caresse", repeated by an artificial... chorus, the natural voice's raving progeny... leaping ephemerally out of line. This morphological restlessness gives pungency to Mion's style. It fissures and punctures a narration that resists, won't dissolve into splinters under the pressure and hail storm of deflections, of solicitations incrusting and wrenching apart the of necessity "flat" narrative rectitude. And yet Mion means to shatter the voice : he attempts to recover the voice's osmosis with the musical. And to advance along the watershed that divides all but imperceptibly the purely esthetic from the semantic. The voice's multifaceted orchestration appears for a considerable duration (first part) to be the chief substance of the sounds, which surround the poetic nucleus like a halo. In short, the music (ideally suited as it is to the oratorio genre) transpires, is an emanation of the text's perpetual vaporousness. With the "dissolution of distinctions" the semantic and the musical cease to be opposed. Sense ceaselessly turns into sound, demonstratively so in some instances (."Dissolution", "Obnubilation"). Just as the phantasmagoria emanates from the poet-ego in the poet (the delirium expanded ego)... the musical and sound phantasy issues from the voice-seed and from the text ("Mangé par l'orange"). So clearly does it issue that soon a fairly distinct cleavage (beginning with "Salamandre") gives it precedence - in an emancipation of the musical instance - over the narrating "soloist". A soloist whose solitude is already encroached upon... a voice doubled, multiplied, anamorphosed into musics... which come to the forefront in a more symphonic fashion in the second part. And with the slow lift off, the irresistible ascension of the musical vessel the titantic sea voyage is transformed toward the end into the opposite of a shipwreck : "Je gagne Ie haut, je touche l'entrée". So that now the luxuriance is no longer merely a rhetorical ingredient but an expansion of existence. The cryptic feathery end with its bells of fossilized snow, solarized white sounds of a mirror traversed further beyond the infinite ("au-delà de l'infini") than 2001 : this is one of the most magically imponderable examples of sound music that I know of. Mion visits Michaux. And what of the image : a double-exposure of the daily or a familiarity with the sublime ? A small miracle takes place : the calm emotion of an encounter on the verge of a permanent departure, an encounter that almost wasn't. --Jean-Christophe THOMAS Some Ideas and Settled Opinions The voice . the reading Above all, nothing theatrical ! In Michaux's work there is a blend of the religious and the intimate, grandeur and sobriety, which inhibits the necessarily more extroverted gestures of the theater. I required restraint and interiority, something approaching a ritual, a ceremonious tone, a majestic voice. Thus the drama is expressed mostly through music and the way the voice is treated. So the drama expresses itself through music... The rapport of the words to the musical texture (from a formal viewpoint) Something different than a mix ! The task I set myself was to integrate the spoken voice with the music, treating it as if it was a song and establishing a dynamic rapport between the prosody and the sounds. I want each word to become audible through movement, I want it to fall into place in the musical phrasing. which means : . A suspended reading . Montage, an artificial spacing in the reading . A musical "writing" favoring short units that can be combined specifically with verbal units. The sense and the sounds, the text and the musical ideas The texts unfolds discontinuously in a succession of very short paragraphs wherein the position and role of the subject shifts. As the narrator, the subject reports what happens to him; he also observes himself. Statements of sensory phenomena, introspection, writing and glimpses of the act of writing as participating in the adventure. I have tried to respond to these different levels of the subject's awareness of himself by articulating a range of auditory propositions. Thus the musical ideas can be differentiated inasmuch as almost all of them belong to different types of electroacoustic music. On one hand, moments of a more "plastic" nature which appeal to a more submerged, not to say physiological, type of listening (collapse the abysmal, the vertiginous, the field...); on the other, more distanced moments when the musical writing lends itself to being thought abstractly as well. A close interaction between the listener and the musical object comparable to that between the subject and the narrative, the reader and the written text. Image Econduite is also characterized by a will to link meaning and music permanently. The symbolic rapport is established on several different levels, in some cases on the level of details and concrete terms (a musical event in response to a given word), in others the relationship is looser (between musical ideas and procedures of writing and meaning). Each will have his own reading of these symbolic rapports. The listener will probably not recognize them all, or will discover others... The image Apart from the voice, the image is the only directly realistic element in this piece, a sound with an explicit extra-musical reference. Occurring frequently yet always furtively, it persuades us as soon as we hear it that there is something there to recognize, to "see"; but what we are given to imagine remains ambiguous. A presence at once disquieting and reassuring... Someone is present... and very close. The narrator himself, as the ending would suggest ? Or the man who is "suddenly there" ("...brusquement là..."), or else someone different ? Be that as it may, the implication is that we have a closed space, a room (the famous chamber?), intimacy. The secrets of which are there to be discovered by whoever wants to discover them. The veiled poetic idea governing this piece : "... la pensée, c'est une image éconduite". Thought is an averted image. --P.M. translation : Michael TAYLOR