Home : Handover, quatre disques construits sur le même principe, soit la déclinaison à partir de quatre appartements de Glasgow et leur(s) habitant(s), d'un même procédé de travail. Au départ le projet nait d'une commande du collectif Arika (Glasgow) : Jean-Luc Guionnet et Eric La Casa s'invitent à domicile, l'hôte présente la pièce dans laquelle il se sent le mieux, les sons qu'il y aime, y fait entendre de la musique tandis que les micros scrutent les lieux. Première étape de travail, première piste de chaque disque. Quelques mois tard, une situation de « concert » : cinq musiciens interprètent ces précédents enregistrements à partir de consignes strictes. Chacun d'entre eux entend la pièce au casque et doit la jouer en fonction de son rôle. Deuxième étape de travail, deuxième piste de chaque disque. A cette même période, une troisième étape est proposée à un sixième musicien, qui joue cette fois chez lui dans sa maison et de ses propres instruments, en improvisant ou non. Les micros sont aussi bien à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur. Troisième piste de chaque disque donc. La quatrième et dernière piste s'ajouta à la commande : une relecture en studio cette fois, un réordonnancement de toute la matière concernant chaque appartement par Eric et Jean-luc eux-mêmes.
Voilà pour l'explication qui renseigne sur le processus qui nous amène aujourd'hui à avoir l'objet disque en main. Mais parler de ce qu'on y entend, de l'effet que nous fait ce disque à l'écoute est d'un tout autre ordre... Un exercice bien plus compliqué. Ce coffret est une œuvre complexe, extrêmement riche. A commencer par la banale et pauvre histoire de style : s'agit-il d'enregistrements de terrain, de concert, d'improvisation, de composition, d'écriture, de manipulation de sons concrets, de documentaire.... un peu tout ça, et rien véritablement. Ce coffret est un objet expérimental absolu. Une expérience dans sa réalisation et également une expérience d'écoute assez vertigineuse. La question esthétique est naturellement mise de côté même si on se surprend à trouver certains passages d'une élégance incroyable. L'attention se faufile ailleurs, elle est aux aguets des plus infimes détails, véritablement offerte à la surprise.
Il y a une dizaine d'années, j'accompagnais Jean-Luc Guionnet & Eric La Casa dans l'édition du disque Maison.House II-V, cinq portraits de maison et de leurs habitants déjà. A l'époque, l'un y jouait du saxophone l'autre des microphones. On y entendait leur façon de faire caractéristique comme faire entendre les étalonnages, faire sentir la signature sonore des lieux, etc. Sauf que sur ce premier disque, c'était à partir du saxophone, souvent en sons continus, que l'oreille arrivait à entendre le reste. Le saxophone devenait le fond sur lequel on écoutait le détail sonore des pièces visitées. Cette fois c'est la musique sélectionnée par l'habitant. La musique devient le bruit de fond sur lequel on appuie notre écoute des craquements, des bruits de pas, des sirènes ou des voix lointaines. L'expérience est déroutante pour l'auditeur qui ressent jusque dans le corps le mouvement des micros dans l'appartement s'éloignant de la source musicale. On se surprend à tourner la tête vers la porte qui s'ouvre sur notre gauche ou à sentir la distance du couloir qui nous sépare des enceintes de l'habitant. On se déplace donc. On s'y perd littéralement d'ailleurs, au point, parfois même, de laisser notre attention suivre la voix de ce petit garçon qui parle français au loin avant de comprendre qu'il s'agit du nôtre, de gamin... Ce bruit de fond des appartements qui fait surface ne peut faire disparaître celui dans lequel on l'écoute, et c'est véritablement troublant. J'ai par exemple écouté le disque IV au casque sur les quais de la gare Lille-Flandres qui a aussi été le terrain d'exploration de Jean-Luc & Eric, il y a une dizaine d'années : quand les bruits mécaniques de la gare, les souffleries et les échos métalliques se mêlent aux sons extérieurs lointains de la ville de Glasgow, le mixage touche parfois au hasard sublime.
Mais Home : Handover va au delà, la suite vient à nouveau délicatement nous déstabiliser. Nous voilà complètement déroutés par la performance de relecture des musiciens qui nous confronte à un effet de dynamique tout autre, par les passages tout en étirement dans la maison du musicien, une lenteur très dense, faisant vraiment rupture avec le reste. Et quand chacun des disques se clôt par la composition électroacoustique des deux artistes à partir des matériaux précédents, on s'abandonne à la jubilation de l'effet de manipulation, le sentiment de n'être plus que des oreilles chahutées, avec la vitesse, la tension et la précision dignes des nerveux du Schimpfluch-Gruppe.
Au-delà donc d'une suite de portraits de maison, au-delà de l'édition d'une commande, c'est un objet qui ne cessera pas de surprendre, touchant à chaque fois de nouveaux territoires sensibles. Comme dit Silvia Sellito, une des habitantes : "Everything is so strong... and I hear things I've never heard actually... ".
Olivier Brisson l Revue & Corrigée l Mars 2015
An ambitious project indeed. Commissioned by Arika in Glasgow, Guionnet and La Casa were asked to invent a work involving local citizens. The pair recorded four different individuals in their respective homes, listening to music and talking about their environment. Their choices of music and comments about their homes are lively insights into other listenings. These recordings were then re-interpreted in a live concert by a quintet of musicians and speakers listening on headphones. A third set of recordings was made by a musician at home, also listening to the original four participants. The three sets of recordings were then mixed into four pieces of colliding perspectives. It's actually simpler than I've made it sound, and surprisingly engaging given its sprawling mass. Interesting that they chose to include the entire process.
It can be difficult to parse what's being said at times, given the thick brogue delivered by some of the Glaswegian speakers. To American ears this comes off as gently humorous, setting up a nice perspective from which to experience what follows. During the concert segments, Lucio Capece, Seijiro Murayama and Neil Davidson play around with, or on top of, a recording (which we have only heard previously) while Gael Leveugle and Aileen Campbell repeat spoken passages or comment on the sounds heard. Keith Beattie then offers his personal response to the recordings, playing guitar and piano and then commenting on what he played and why. This work gives us a unique look into the way different individuals work with or think about or interpret sound in various environments and contexts. Far from a dry academic exercise, it is quite often light hearted and funny, and I can easily see these practices engaged in elsewhere, in listening workshops or perhaps as music therapy.
The final four collages, each made from the bits of one participant's original recordings and subsequent re-interpretations, are engaging in several ways. They resemble early Hafler Trio records with their mixture of enigmatic speech and processed sound bites. And as we've presumably been through the material, having listened to everything that came before, memory is enlisted and sometimes taxed, along with our pondering what or why.
A weighty package this. Four CDs of interesting and intriguing work, giving an example of how listening practices can be set up and then assembled for mass investigation. Bravo.
Jeph Jerman l The Squid's Ear l November 2015
In 2010, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Éric La Casa were invited to the Uninstal festival in Glasgow to conduct a series of live home recordings alongside natives of the Scottish city. The result, Home: Handover, is a blend of field recordings, spoken word, music and improvisation. The composition consists of a score with four phases mapped to the 4CD set. The settings of the recordings, while subject to significant variation, retain the characteristic of the “single sequence shot”, in a close emotional relationship that binds people to spaces and to hearing. These are stories of everyday life, unveiled by interventions that, while subtle, possess a sonic nuance and a deep understanding of the different contexts encountered. The people, the rooms, the chorus chants give off a special poetry and truth. The first phase of the composition includes narrative parts and favorite listenings, the second is a documentation of a public performance at the Tramway, with five performers, two speakers and three instrumentalists. In the third phase of the score we hear a home recording with musicians interacting and reinterpreting previous recordings. In the final phase, Gionnet and La Casa freely mix the previous three phases without the use of additional processing or sound materials. This is a kind of “studio synthesis drift.” Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural.it
Mi Casa es Su Casa
I’ve sometimes wondered what neighbours make of the sounds audible from within these walls. If it’s anything like my impression of audio-idiocy piped over from nearby student tenements then I should probably watch my step. Perhaps you also wonder why others don’t hear what you do. Luckily, musician/sound artists Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa are on hand to shed some light on this intellectual blind spot and may even change the way you feel about what’s keeping you awake at night, though perhaps not. La Casa (at least) is an old hand at locational recordings, having put out a number of collaborative projects over the last few years, several of which involving Guionnet and other people’s houses-as-listening-spaces. Home: Handover (POTLACH P314) is, however, no ordinary field recording.
On paper at least it presents a daunting prospect, consisting of four CDs themed identically on the experiences and process(es) of music appreciation, related by four Glasgow inhabitants who, as they introduce their favourite music in the comfort of their homes, become the actors in their own stories, while in a sense inverting the entrenched artist/audience hierarchy. If the shelves of available music biographies serve as any indication, there is plenty of interest in the creative stages between artistic inspiration and realisation, while the listener’s emotional response is quantified purely in terms of sales figures (or in Elvis’ case, a self-gratifying album title). But La Casa isolates and examines the listener end of the process, allowing subjects to demonstrate the value of their own status; freely explaining their music preferences, listening habits and histories while the music assumes a variable background role. As each subjects speaks, La Casa continues to record as he moves around the house, finally surrendering his microphone to the subject to continue their ruminations. Quite self-consciously at times, as in the case of Lisa, our first subject, who wonders aloud what you and I will make of her thoughts about New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. Others are more self-assured and even deliberate, as with Tango Crash fan and audiophile, Tim Nunn. What you make of their music tastes is one thing, because extending as far as ‘Evita’, something will likely chafe, but only the hardest of hearts will deny the common coin of music-love.
Beyond the walls of the house, the above recordings are piped into a live setting via headphones to an improvising quintet comprising male and female voices, saxophone, guitar and percussion. The musicians interpret the recordings (inaudible to the audience) according to prearranged rules, dividing sounds loosely into melody, rhythm and sonic interference, thus avoiding redundancy or intrusion. Just as interestingly, the vocalists’ real-time shadowing of our subjects comprises an amusing challenge, managing some adept turn-taking, but not without a deliciously awkward undertone – one effect of adding a non-native English speaker I suppose. The sense of exiting the very comfort zone that the original recordings are set in keeps things spontaneous into the third phase of listening: the recorded aggregate is handed on to a third party, Keith Beattie, who listens and responds, ever whimsically, to the recordings at home by way of speech or ad lib musical gestures. For the fourth and final stage Guionnet and La Casa overlay/collage everything recorded thus far, serving it up with selective editing. This is perhaps the most calculated stage, with our conceptualists ensuring that the preceding haphazardness is seen to fit more or less into a specific structure, ultimately ensuring that individual predilection can be categorised, perhaps the way Amazon does with sales algorithms.
At the other end of the listening process I honestly don’t know what to make of all this. Four discs certainly seems rather excessive for mere tomfoolery, but I’m left with more questions than answers. What exactly does the structural identity of each disc say about the value of the individual listening experience? Is all music pop these days? Are we to regard our innermost experiences as a generic by-product of the music industry? Look beneath the seeming identity into the variegation of the moment-by-moment listening experience? What would Jorge-Luis Borges’ character Funes – who could provide a different label for every split second of existence – have made of this? Better questions than nothing I suppose. All told, while not for casual listening, this is certainly a remarkable and thought-provoking endeavour that does offer intelligent new perspectives on seemingly familiar experiences.
Stuart Marshall, The Sound Projector, http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2015/04/04/listening-habitats/
Ambitious, four-disc, multi-stage collaborative project interweaving spoken word, field recordings, structured minimalist improvisation and sound art
To describe this ambitious, four-disc, multi-stage collaborative project in any detail would require a far larger space than the one this review inhabits. In brief, Home: Handover is an exploration of sanctuaries and private lives and acoustics, with each disc divided into four distinct phases.
In Phase I, a Glasgow resident describes their home, captures its sounds, listens to their favourite music, and talks about the experience of being recorded. Phase II, recorded live in Tramway in 2010, consists of an improvising ensemble (Aileen Campbell, Neil Davidson, Gael Leveugle, Lucio Capece and Seijiro Murayama) interpreting and abstracting the content of the original recording through strictly specified roles: vocal and instrumental mimesis, narrative description, sustained sound. In Phase III, musician Keith Beattie (of The Red Ensemble) improvises in response to elements of Phase I, in the process describing his participation and recording a sonic map of his own home and the surrounding environment. Finally, in Phase IV, the first three Phases are taken into a studio and combined into a real-time collage.
Comprising more than four hours of interwoven spoken word, field recordings, structured minimalist improvisation and sound art, this project demands a lot of the listener. But there’s something curiously compelling about it. Perhaps it’s the sense of trust and intimacy it entails — its post-John Cage acceptance of all sounds as equally valid demands intimate attention to what would normally be unnoticed background noise. The listener becomes hyper-aware of the home of a perfect stranger, far more so than if they dropped in for a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake. And with each subsequent interpretation, response and processing, the encounter becomes abstracted or subsumed into someone else’s perspective, which raises some intriguing, even uncomfortable questions about the extent to which we prioritise the vividness of our own experience and how we relate to one another. It’s big and clever and thought-provoking, but probably not one to play at the office Christmas bash.
Matt Evans, The list, https://www.list.co.uk/article/66995-jean-luc-guionnet-eric-la-casa-home-handover/
How do we listen to music at home? Not us, mind you, but other people, normal people. How aware are we of the environment in which we listen, what references do we make, how does nostalgia fit in, how would our thoughts about these matters differ from others? How would they understand these personal preferences and thoughts? What does it really sound like in our apartments, homes, etc. when we think we're listening? Some of the questions approached by Guionnet and La Casa on this rather massive, very unusual and fascinating venture, "Home: Handover".
A few words of explanation as to the release's structure: Four CDs, each an hour long. Each CD consists of four sections, approximately 15 minutes per section and each follows the same pattern, initiated by a different representative from Glasgow on each disc (Lisa Peebles, Tim Nunn, Zoe Strachan and Silvia Sellitto, non-musicians all; the first and third, incidentally, sporting Scottish accents, the second, English and the last, Italian). In the first section, we encounter the subject in his or her apartment where they discuss their music listening habits, play an example of their favorite music (during which La Casa wanders through the apartment, the strains of music growing louder or more distant depending on his location), respond to questions regarding the activity they're engaging in at this moment and, finally, wander about their abode holding the microphone themselves, having roughly the experience La Casa did just before and answering questions about their perceptions. Next, this entire episode is interpreted in a live, concert setting by a quintet consisting of Aileen Campbell & Gael Leveugle (voice), Lucio Capece (saxophone), Neil Davidson (guitar) and Seijiro Murayama (percussion) with each musician listening to the earlier recoding on headphones (not heard by the audience) and responding in a specified manner. One vocalist imitates, as closely as possible, the voices he or she hears, as closely as possible while the other provides a commentary on what he or she is hearing, taking care not to speak while the first is talking. The musicians perform one of three activities: 1) imitate estimated frequency, notes and melodies from what he's hearing and reproduce them, 2) generate sounds from rhythms, breaks or other more "structural" events and 3) Estimate the signal to noise ratio of the tape, creating "a noisy sound" on his instrument that fluctuates accordingly.
In the third section, a musician, Keith Beattie, listens to the apartment recordings (after we hear a few minutes of the ambient sounds in this new interior venue), roams through his home improvising or playing a song, answering questions and free associating, gradually making his way outside where the exterior environment "becomes the recording's only source. Finally, Guionnet and La Casa take all three recordings, overlay them (they have the same temporal structure) and present them with minimal editing, though allowing themselves the option of removing elements as they choose. I get the sense that all of these "rules" are allowed to be bent a bit.
Again, this procedure is carried out four times, once per disc. Two questions immediately arise: 1) Are four iterations necessary to present as a recording? and 2) Given four discs, might it have been more interesting (at least, more suspenseful), to have all the apartment recordings on Disc One, the concert session on Disc Two, etc. instead of four similar "chapters"? I go back and forth on these.
Let me give a brief description of one disc, arbitrarily choosing the first.
"There has to be someone who knows the best way to light a barbecue", the first words, from a television I presume, one hears" (after La Casa's cueing, "Top!", that is), before Ms. Peebles begins to describe her home, the enjoyable light therein, the various comforts. She's very accommodating and warm, not appearing too embarrassed. Her voices shifts from speaker to speaker as she moves about; American English speakers will delight in her burr. Suddenly, synth drums intrude as she begins to play her favorite song. I have no idea what it is (and find it pretty awful!--googling the lyric, it's apparently Orgy's "Blue Monday") [I'm informed the song is actually by New Order and apparently very well known, thus displaying the depths of my 80s-90s rock knowledge] but she describes the dance scene, I guess in Glasgow, around 1990 from whence it sprung. The music fades in and out as La Casa wanders through the apartment, door hinges squeaking, closing, muffling the sound, other sounds and even music (from a TV?) leaching in. A welter of sounds--laughter, new songs, chatter, a toilet flushing--you get a great sense of sonic confusion listening remotely like this, much more so that you'd experience in situ. The music abruptly ceases about 11 minutes in, replaced by a chuckle from Ms. Peebles and her thoughts on how others might view the activity in which she's currently engaged, an interesting bit of self-perception, after which she's heard holding the mic and walking about, commenting on what she's hearing from a different perspective than she's used to. One gets the sense that this kind of listening, on a more purely aural level, is something she's never done before and she also seems to take in other sensory input more consciously than normal, integrating the sonic aspects with what she sees out a window.
This episode cuts out cleanly and we shift to the performance, an entirely different feeling ensuing even as the source material is what we've just been hearing. The male voice is replicating Ms. Peebles' speech with a necessary awkwardness of phrasing as he struggles to speak while listening, Murayama tapping out irregular patterns on a drum, Capece offering the occasional soft tone on soprano. Soon, the female voice begins opining on what Peebles' apartment is like-- "I think the room is probably beige"--though this is rare as Peeble's voice was fairly constant at this point, allowing the new vocalist few points of entry. (Peebles' voice itself enters for a little while, repeating several sentences we heard earlier; I'm not sure why this occurs). As the musicians begin hearing the music, Capece more or less imitates the basic melody while Murayama pounds out the rhythm; I haven't picked up Davidson at all by this point, but perhaps I'm missing some subtlety, maybe he's playing the guitar as percussion. It's really a fascinating performance, very unusual. You might relate it to aspects of Ashley's operas, that's as close as I can think of, but not very, maybe an faint echo of Gavin Bryars' "1, 2, 1-2-3-4". It's kind of funny hearing Campbell's assumptions, generally visual, of what the Peebles apartment is like as she lets herself go in what strikes me as almost poetic license, a more enjoyable tack than more mundane approaches. "I think there's a carpet and quilts. And the quilts are pink, probably." "I think the house might smell of new carpets." Other shifts and edits seem to be occurring as well, not sure if the performance has been adjusted or edited post facto by La Casa and Guionnet. I love this track (and the like ones on the other discs); very fresh, very fascinating.
The Beattie section, as stated, begins simply with the quiet ambient sounds of his apartment for three minutes. We then, for the third time, hear Peebles remarks on thunderstorms and trees before suddenly shifting to gentle piano playing amidst the rush of traffic outside--very lovely and I like the fact that it's allowed to linger for a good while and that it remains fuzzy and lo-fi. It's not until 11 minutes in that Beattie's voice enters, describing what he's just played (he plays guitar on the other three discs) and continuing on to talk about his home, family and how he records music there. There are "marker" beeps between scenes here so the transition are quite sharp. One occurs after his brief patter as we walk outside the house, listen to the traffic. The track is relatively simple compared to the first two and works really well.
The final section, with Guionnet and La Casa working with the above material, is necessarily a kind of collage piece and I find myself hearing it in two different ways. On the one hand, there's a distance, maybe even a fussiness about it that contrasts with the relative straightforwardness of what's preceded it and I shrink a little bit from its artificiality. Considered on its own, however, it works just fine, shards of dialogue, ambient sound, music etc. intersecting with one another in unexpected ways. Kind of a stew made of known ingredients, lumpy here, smooth there. Their approach varies considerably from disc to disc, the track on Disc 3, for example, being notably quiet and restrained. "What do you think the actual audience will think about what you thought they would think?" the bland female voice inquires at the end.
The three other discs are alike in many ways though made up of entirely different material. The individuals vary a good bit, Nunn seeming to be a bit more aesthetically aware, more self-conscious and alert to the process, choosing a kind of pop tango (the band, Tango Crash) as his song; Strachan listens to light classical on BBC3 while Sellitto's selection might well test the patience of many readers of this page as Joan Baez' rendition of "The Boxer" rings through her apartment, followed by (oh no!) "Evita". But of course that's part of the charm and, indeed, an essential element of the project: people who listen to and love kinds of music that I don't and one retains a strong sense of humanity after listening to this quartet of music lovers, however different they are from you and I.
It's really an amazing and beautifully realized document. I still go back and forth on the two qualms I raised initially but I'm very glad this unique and thoughtful document exists. Everyone interested in the intersection of music and the act of listening should hear it.
Brian Olewnick, just outside, http://olewnick.blogspot.fr/2014/12/jean-luc-guionneteric-la-casa-home.html
Quatre CDs représentant plus de quatre heures de son, voici le cru automnal 2014 du label Potlatch. On y croisera aussi bien New Order, que Joan Baez ou encore une obscure formation de tango argentin. On peinera à déchiffrer l’accent écossais pour se plonger dans l’attachement de femmes et d’hommes à leur lieu de vie et leur rapport à la musique. Mais qu’est-ce donc finalement que ce Home: Handover ?
Ce coffret de quatre CDs est l’aboutissement d’un projet débuté en 2010 par Jean-Luc Guionnet et Eric La Casa. Le collectif de Glasgow Arika avait invité les deux musiciens à venir enregistrer des habitants de Glasgow dans leur lieu de vie
Un protocle bien précis fut adopté : un seul plan séquence, les habitants doivent parler de leur lieu de vie, de l’endroit où ils écoutent de la musique, choisir une musique qu’ils apprécient particulièrement puis partir avec le matériel d’enregistrement visiter tout ou partie de leur domicile. Ce plan séquence est livré tel quel en première plage de chaque CD.
La seconde plage est tirée d’un concert donné à Glasgow où cinq musiciens (Gaël Leveugle – voix, Aileen Campbell – voix, Lucio Capece – saxophone, Seijiro Murayama – Percussion, Neil Davidson – guitare) ré-interprètent chacun des quatre plans séquences qu’ils entendent en direct dans leur casque.
La troisième plage est la ré-interprétation de chaque plan séquence par un musicien, Keith Beattie, seul dans sa maison.
Enfin, la quatrième plage est le résultat d’un mix réalisé par Jean-Luc Guionnet et Eric La Casa de chacune des trois plages précédentes, chaque CD étant consacré à une seule et même personne.
Il s’agit là d’une version plus élaborée d’un projet que les deux musiciens avaient porté il y a une dizaine d’années, Maisons, qui consistait à enregistrer des gens dans leur espace sonore et vivant, projet qui avait donné lieu à un CD. Ici, le concept est poussé beaucoup plus loin car, au-delà de la musicalité propre au discours des personnes enregistrées, à la captation de leur espace sonore et parfois mental, Jean-Luc Guionnet et Eric La Casa créent au fur et à mesure des différents protocoles de manipulation une véritable musique électroacoustique vivante et sensuelle trouvant son aboutissement dans les mélanges et collisions de la quatrième plage de chaque CD. Reste à savoir si le concept matérialisé ici est finalisé ou si il s’agit uniquement de sa forme actuelle et passagère dont témoigne ces quatre CDs…
https://freesilence.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/jean-luc-guionnet-eric-la-casa-home-handover/ - november 2014
Potlatch, comparé à d'autres labels, ne sort pas énormément de disques, mais quand ce label en sort un il se fait remarquer tout de suite généralement. Et en cette fin d'année, avec un coffret de quatre CD, composés par deux des plus remarquables musiciens français, Jean-Luc Guionnet et Eric La Casa, une fois encore, cette sortie ne passera pas inaperçue dans le milieu des amateurs de musique expérimentale. D'autant plus qu'à défaut d'être une très bonne initiative éditoriale, Home: Handover est un également un projet musical et conceptuel très surprenant.
C'est le genre de projet à faire couler beaucoup d'encre, et il en fera couler je pense. C'est toute une méthode de travail, toute une approche du son, de la matière musicale, de la performance et de la perception (de ces éléments, mais aussi de manière générale) qui sont en jeu ici. Autant d'éléments théoriques et philosophiques sur lesquels on peut multiplier les gloses. Et pour dire la vérité, je n'ai pas très envie de rentrer dans ce jeu, et j'aimerais me contenter de parler uniquement de ce qu'il se passe sur ce disque, le plus simplement possible, car je pense que la mise en forme, les indications du livret, et les articles parus ou à paraître orienteront suffisamment la lecture de ce disque. C'est passionnant, perturbant, très perturbant comme projet, mais de quoi s'agit-il finalement.
Chacun des quatre disques est structuré de la même manière. La première piste est un enregistrement d'une personne dans son appartement, cette personne qui change à chaque disque décrit l'endroit idéal pour écouter de la musique, lit son morceau préféré in situ, puis commentent différentes choses sur l'expérience qu'elle vient de vivre, qu'est-ce qu'elle en penseraitdans d'autres conditions, etc. La seconde piste est un enregistrement en situation de concert où cinq personnes interprètent à sa manière l'enregistrement précédent. Deux personnes parlent (imitation ou commentaire) et trois musiciens interprètent les mélodies, rythmes et bruits de l'enregistrement (Lucio Capece, Seijiro Murayama et Neil Davidson). La troisième piste est réalisée par un musicien (Keith Beattie sur chaque disque) qui propose une lecture différente des enregistrements en appartement. Il se situe dans une maison, joue un morceau de musique, parle librement et se déplace en intérieur comme en extérieur en accordant beaucoup plus de place à l'acoustique du lieu où il se trouve et à l'environnement sonore global. Quant à la dernière piste, qui ne fait pas partie de la commande originelle d'Arika, c'est une édition et un mixage des trois précédentes pistes qui ressemble beaucoup à ce qu'on peut attendre d'une pièce de musique concrète, avec ses rythmes et ses mélodies bruitistes et environnementaux.
Voilà. Il y aurait beaucoup à dire, mais je n'y tiens pas. Je pense que rien ne vaut l'expérience vraiment singulière de l'écoute de ce disque. Une expérience qui pose question sur l'écoute, sur la matière musical, sur la perception générale et musicale, sur l'audition dans un environnement intime ou public, sur l'interprétation et plein d'autres choses. Et c'est cette remise en question ainsi que le fait que les questions soient la matière musicale elle-même qui font que Home: Handover est une oeuvre si perturbante, une suite de pièces qui nous plonge dans la confusion la plus totale en faisant perdre tous les repères possibles. C'est pour cette raison que je trouve ce disque admirable, profond, et unique. Je n'ai pas envie de le commenter plus que ça, car je ne me sens pas de le faire, je me sens trop dépassé par cet univers qui s'ouvre, et c'est pour cette raison que je l'aime, car il ouvre réellement de nouvelles perspectives.
Julien Héraud, Improv sphere, http://improv-sphere.blogspot.fr/2014/11/jean-luc-guionnet-eric-la-casa-home.html
A central problem in experimental music is the “voice,” both in the sense of the modernist conception of identity/authority and in the role (more specific to environmental recordings and musique concrète) of actual human voices as part of an audial milieu. Some of the most engaging recent work in the broad area of “field recordings” and the like has directly engaged the latter. Marc Baron, Jason Lescalleet and others have, in this, followed the example of John Cage and Robert Ashley. This extraordinary, bewildering four-disc document from longtime collaborators Guionnet and La Casa takes these interests to their extreme and constructs something altogether singular.
Building on their obsession with environment (built or natural), Home: Handover was born as a festival commission from Glasgow, which asked the two musicians to compose a piece built around home recordings of Glaswegians. Persons were chosen and a rough outline of topics established, asking each participant to describe “his favorite music in his favorite room of his apartment.” And don’t we do this, collectively? Anyone reading Dusted has a space they retreat to with and in and through music, whether it is a room or not. It’s an angle that not only demands we think about how we participate in music by listening to it, it also gives us a way of thinking artfully about the very mundane environments from which we want music to deliver us.
Enough about that, though. Here’s how it was assembled in four distinct “phases,“ each one on a single disc here. The first phase (“Domestic Listening/Tipping Point”) features the four Glaswegians doing the talking. The second (“Public Drift”) is a performance of the interviews, where two vocalists (Aileen Campbell and Gaël Laveugle) recite bits of them and three instrumentalists (saxophonist Lucio Capece, guitarist Neil Davidson, percussionist Seijiro Murayama) play along. All three are plugged into headphones allowing them to hear the original recordings, which they interact with according to “a rigorous protocol.” Third is “House,” where a fifth Glaswegian listens to phase one, supplementing it with his own commentary and instrumental accompaniment. And finally there is “Studio. Synthesis Drift,” where Guionnet and La Casa mix, blend, scramble, and collate all of these materials.
It’s a whopper, and it sounds alternately exhausting, frustrating, surprising, hilarious, melancholy, and more or less all things you can imagine. You almost get to know these four people, and as you are absorbed into this odd world (you never absorb it yourself), you become aware of motifs, signposts and regular features that give it texture and coherence, yes, but they also announce the music’s many questions. The starkness of the first disc, relative to the others, is engaging. Lisa Peebles lilts spaciously, with occasional ambient sound accompanying her: the stuttering start of what sounds like New Order or ‘80s synth-pop, a creaking door, muffled conversations outside the room. It was surprising to note the vast dynamic range on this disc, and the different effects that matched the spoken rhythms, like the sputter that accompanies Tim Nunn’s brogue. Snippets of sax pop up unexpectedly, some flute too, and the moments of coalescence—tape muffle, voices, sax picking up the pop tune—are quite rich. The softness of these voices and their surroundings sometimes suggests a Toshiya Tsunoda track being birthed: car noises, wind and tape, refracted music over the stereo.
The chorus thickens over the 74-minute duration of the second disc’s concert performance. Amidst more apartment tours and rambling conversation, that creaky door or floorboard returns, now heralding another musical ingredient, Tango Crash, which we are told is the sexiest music on the planet. As the recording of the tango-derivative music is played, slightly distorted, in the background, the same discourse is then repeated by Capece playing the part of Tango Crash. Periodically a woman’s semi-robotic voice is heard asking various questions, like “What do you think about the audience, and wht do you think they will think?” There are long stretches of soft street noise, mandolin recordings, and beeps, as different elements float in and out, making ever hazier those lines between foreground and background, human and machine, spontaneous and assembled, artist and audience. Zoe Strachan describes her kitchen love to open the third disc, with occasional musical interruptions (hers or the performers’?). In one of the highlights of this release, she drops a wonderful meta-reference when describing her disappointment at expecting music and getting spoken word. By this point in the experience you begin to forget the format altogether. Voices pile up as if you were suddenly jarred at someone else’s dinner party. But at just these moments, there is inevitably a rough scratch or an electronic rustle or some recorded sound to remind you. Voices peek through the secondary recitation and the instrumental mix, announcing above the radio all those things that can be heard on the other side of the apartment wall.
It’s a fascinating suggestion that the medium of listening is always a kind of eavesdropping. It hangs over the procession of the fourth disc’s freewheeling studio mix of all the previous elements. Inscrutable and unpredictable, it’s filled with the now-familiar motifs as well as a bestiary of new music and new noise: crowds, a French woman rambling while a record plays a terrible version of “The Boxer” (although it’s aces when the percussion and clarinet pick up the “Li la li” theme), water, breath, planes Doppler-ing away to the accompaniment of acoustic guitar, Joan Baez singing “Evita.” By the time the end arrives, things are so scrambled that, when the robot lady poses one last question and the squeaky door closes one last time, you feel as if you should begin speaking, your own thoughts loosed to become someone else’s composition. It’s fascinating, strange stuff.
Jason Bivins, dusted magazine, http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/112153987681/jean-luc-guionnet-eric-la-casa-home-handover