ERIC LA CASA Barrières Mobiles (BookCD by Swarming)

Éric La Casa has frequently focused on the fascinating qualities of the more mundane sounds of Paris. On Barri​è​res Mobiles, he turns his attention to a relatively recent feature of Parisian daily life: the mobile barriers that were erected in response to the November 2015 terrorist attacks. “The public space has been covered with these barriers, which, over the last decade, summer and winter, day and night, have become the symbols of low-noise security in everyday life,” La Casa writes. For this album, he set about “hearing how these objects themselves perceive the city” by attaching contact mics to the barriers to record the sounds produced by their movement. Huge resonant echoes dominate the soundscape as wind makes the steel structures shake, but we also hear the noises of the city from a distance—children playing, people talking, hurried footsteps—as if eavesdropping on a lively scene from inside a rattling cage. Matthew Blackwell, March 28, 2023, The Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp: March 2023

Eric La Casa is a French sound artist who has worked in the field of sound creation since the early nineties through recording, record production, installation, radio and various types of publications.
'Barri​è​res Mobiles' is a sound story told from the perspective of a series of mobile metal barriers that were put up around Paris after the 2015 terrorist attacks. These metal barriers were placed at the entrances to public buildings (schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, museums, town halls, police stations, etc...) which become the symbol for low-noise security in daily life. These recordings were captured by environmental contact microphones.
In these dark and muted recordings you will hear eerie steel clangs and the vast mysterious echoes that follow, metal barriers shuddering and rattling, low frequency rumblings that swirl through these ominous soundscapes, the distant cacophony of human voices - talking and screaming away, howling wind noises, the hollowing shimmering of objects making contact with steel, some sort of mechanical chugging, industrial grinding, random rustling movements, crows cawing, spooky ambience, very faint traces of some type of music playing and a variety of abstract noises and drones that haunt this dark sonic environment.
'Barri​è​res Mobiles' is an eerie and haunting audio portrayal of a troubled world from the point of view of an inanimate object that's used as a symbol and a reminder of the violence and tragedy that plagues our existence on a everyday basis.
It is also a fascinating sound journey, and a mesmerizing work of art. The natural creaking and rattling of these metal barriers that are left outside and exposed to the elements, along with the (maybe) not-so-naturally-occuring accompanying sounds makes for a very interesting listen. AudioCrackle May 2023

A sight in the big city, in many, are all sorts of fences, mobile barriers, and such things. Terror attacks and protests of all sorts are responsible for such limitations on where we are allowed to go. In Paris, where Eric La Casa lives, there are many more than in Nijmegen. From the liner notes, I understand that La Casa isn’t happy with these metal barriers, but they are also instruments for the changed urban environment. He went around town, armed with contact microphones and a recorder and recorded them. Big ones, small ones, set in motion by the wind; the urban Aeolian harp , even when that is, perhaps, too much of a nice description. Effectively, these objects control the public in small and large groups. You would think that some extra sound would leak its way into the recordings, a faraway rock concert or farmers’ protest, but that doesn’t happen, only in every instance (in the section called ‘Des Evenements’); it remains metal vibrating in windy environments. Does that mean it all sounds the same? No, far from it, actually. As the booklet shows us, fences come in many shapes and forms: big, extensive, and smaller. It’s easy to see they will make a different sound. There is something eerie about these pieces: a rumble from the deep, a monster clinging to the pipes in your basement. Sometimes, this is a deep-end rumble, but occasionally high; monsters of all sizes, as it were. One could think there is a lot of sound processing going on, but there isn’t (at least, I am convinced there isn’t), yet the sound is quite ‘full’; everything continues to resonate. It’s likewise accessible to see this as a ‘political’ album about the sorry state of current global affairs, in which terrorism plays a big role, and all sorts of protests are found on the streets. As such, this is bleak music for bleak times. But it sounds great!
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly 1426

After the jihad attacks in November 2015, a large part of the spaces of the public buildings in Paris were reprojected with the addition of resistant metal bars at the entrances. This initiative was solving some practical problems of public order and somehow it started up a civil ritual of symbolic huge impact, under the forms of “media event”, whose cover actually came to saturate the tv and paper offer, with twists between the various information media, both digital and traditional. Eric La Casa immediately underlined the rhetoric of the clash of civilizations of this cultural trauma and how the theme of the security was actually just a cover for a system of social control more and more pervasive and authoritative. “From what and from whom are we protecting ourselves?” This is the very first question, simple and essential, the author makes, also insisting that these steel obstacles were installed, without any prior consultation and without any indication being given to citizens about how long they would remain in force. Eric La Casa declares he was also very interested in understanding how these “items” were interpreting the city, as they were also provided with perceptions and sensitivity, apparently a bizarre concept, which had actually some eminent predecessors in the French surrealists, authors as Louis Aragon, André Breton and Marcel Noll, who already in the mid-twenties poetically equated architecture, places and streets with agglomerations having their own specific nature. Once again, the urban space is explored, evaluated, observed and dug through the filter of the artistic vision, that in this case is not neutral at all, not just esthetic, and does not offer any superficial activism. To win the metropolitan labyrinth, it’s necessary to get through it, acknowledging a status also to the items, questioning the same perception of the reality, enlarging the notion of daily life, with the recording of the background noises, the resonances and the inaudible. So, we are still in the middle of the 20th century avantgarde, that maybe did not keep all its promises, but not even it’s out of syntony of the times, and it manages to be still related with the collective conscience in the social groups, working as a method of receptiveness and opening to the others and to the world. In Barrières Mobiles Eric La Casa presents four tracks and three “silences of 10, 20 and 30 seconds as moments of intermission between the main tracks. They set up scenarios, who are at the same time disturbing, ethereal and slightly claustrophobic, although the audio captures were mostly collected in open spaces, such as for example the Parc de La Villette. The need for a silent security in the everyday life get still questioned: this does not change the destinies of the people, but it’s still something to hold on to.
Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural magazine 74, June 2024