CURATORIAL STATEMENT As an artist and editor of vibrö/vibrofiles.com I almost involuntarily keep my finger on the irregular pulse of international sound art. Scattered all over, small but hyperactive communities seem to proliferate and their idiosyncratic identities crystallize. At a time of segmented globalization, however, any first-hand witness will admit that most of this activity and knowledge remains fairly local… With 4 issues to this day, “vibrö” has been described as “perfect material to build up your library of essential recordings”. Still, any attempt to be exhaustive about the nature and variety of these ‘essentials recordings’ would be unrealistic. Therefore, as often with curatorial decisions, the choice was focused on a slice, a snapshot, a restricted angle. Seeing and hearing what is being produced under my ears and nose on a daily basis, I decided to put together a very territorial selection of works by French artists, accompanied by a few related short films, stretching the frame of strictly-audio works. Despite their limited contextual perimeter, these works illustrate the vibrant diversity of experimental explorations ranging from creative radio to electroacoustic composition, noise, soundtrack for installations, cinema for the ear, collage and more… Throwing a bottle to an ‘ocean of sound’…The idea of these works being delocalised in such an impalpable manner (from laptop to server to an almost unknown destination…) is both exciting and puzzling. How will a dozen of ‘residues’ from France resonate here? How will the cultural divide operate? How do ideas and aesthetics travel across continents to be appropriated and recycled? Let’s hope chance encounters and feedback take place in the rhizomatic under-layers.
BIOS Valerie Vivancos is a sound artist living and working in Paris, after 11 years spent abroad (UK & US). A graduate from the Chelsea School of Art, with tutors including Dave Ryan, Hayley Newman and Rebecca Warren, she also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with Laetitia Sonami, Doug Hall, George Kuchar and Martin Schmidt. For a year, she assisted the curator Alexandre Pollazzon by day and regularly DJayed electronic music by night (as LiliB) in various London venues. Since 1997, She has been taking part in a great number of international art projects accross Europe, Brazil, and the USA. Her artistic practice lies at the crossroads of conceptual performance and experimental sound compositions, illustrated by the participative event « Sleep In Opera » organised in a bunker of Copenhagen (2002). She regularly collaborates with Rodolphe Alexis (performing together as OttoannA), Claudia Wegener, other artists and collectives including Double Entendre, M.U., NoGoZones, Foreign Investment, on the occasion of live events, urban and radio interventions (Resonnance FM, Sound Drop, Nuit Blanche, Palais de Tokyo, Agendas of the Venice Bienale). Following the co-founding, in 1998, of a bilingual art magazine with Rose-Hélène Iché, she continues to write and translate theoretical texts and has been featured in various French and English publications. She also regularly lectures and runs workshops on art and sound (Festival Musique Action, ENACT, Camberwell College of Art , M.U. asso). Aymeric de TAPOL is a recording engineer, composer and multimedia artist,born in 1974. After Graduating from Toulouse School of Fine Arts, in 2000, he joined the artist collective Construct, with Frederic Blin (multimedia programming), Cathie Verdin (dance) and Rémi Duveauchelle (lights). Within this context, he directed videos and composed sound works. He has also had residences at the Groupe de Musique Électroacoustique in Albi, at the French Institute of Kuala Lumpur, (Malaysia) and at the French Institute of Bilbao (Spain). Through the VOLKSYSTEME art centre, in Toulouse, he collaborated with several different artists in the fields of video and sound improvisation. Besides these activities, he is currently working as a composer and sound engineer for films and documentaries. http://a.detapol.free.fr/ Berangere Maximin was born in 1976 in the Island of Reunion, the "Native Country" of her mother (France) and grew up there until the age of 15. As a composer, Berangere knows how to preserve the spirit of live music in the studio. This passion has probably been passed on to her from her friends guitarists and singers in Rock and World music bands. For over six years, she has performed as a singer. Later on, she concluded her studies of electroacoustic music in the composition class of Denis Dufour at the Perpignan Conservatoire (South of France). It is in Paris that she had her first professional experiences by composing music pieces for concert. In 2002, she settled down in this city. At this time she writes musical works for concert and radioshows, contribuating to the French Contemporary Music Movement. She builds her musics in her Home Sweet Home Studio, shooting sounds in a dark silent room, recording soundscapes, focusing acoustic sounds, sampling, playing with digital effects, primary instruments, using her voice. This attraction to light and impactfull sounds give her compositions and sound design a very special fresh touch. Christian Zanési studied at Pau University with Marie-Françoise Lacaze and Guy Maneveau, then in Paris at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique under Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel. He has been a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the I.N.A. since 1977. He is the head of the musical programming at the GRM and a producer at France Musiques. As far as Christian Zanési is concerned, sound is the prime element. It is an intrinsically expressive matter. Before being developed in the electronic studio, composition is often triggered by a specific encounter like: the sound of suburban trains for the piece Grand bruit, the sound of an ironworks for Constructions Métalliques, the night sound of the rue Lecourbe for Stop !l'horizon or radio archives for Arkheion. After this first encounter comes the time-based work, the musical writing. http://www.vibrofiles.com/artists/artists_christian_zanesi.php Dinahbird is a radio artist, feature maker, and co-founder of Project IOI. She makes radio programmes, audio publications, installations, and soundtracks. Her narrative based sound collages are a poetic flux of storytelling, anecdote, music and field recordings. Recents works have been played on BBCR4, France Culture's Atelier de Création Radiophonique and on Kunst Radio. At present she is giving sound workshops at the Museum of Modern Art, Paris. http://www.project-101.com/bio/bird.php Goran Vejvoda, sound artist based in Paris. After studying music in Belgrade, he turns to contemporary music's and art.Guitarist with various rock bands (Idoli, in former-Yugoslavia and Oko 3 in France), he worked with Enki Bilal composing the soundtracks of Tykho Moon and Immortel, with Angelin Preljocaj for his shows at the Paris Opera (Le Parc & Casanova) ,or with Jacques Ossang on the music of his films. He has several solo albums, Fruit Cloud and Harmonie, (Japan) cosigned a record with Suba, The Dreambird (Brazil), Mikro-Organizmi with Rambo (Serbia-Montenegro) or What with Zerone (France). In 1986 he published a book devoted to Brian Eno and is currently preparing a compendium on sound art. He has exhibited since 1981 and in 2004 was part of the exhibition “Off The Record”, at the Arc/Musée D'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Vejvoda works around the interrogation, on the nature of sounds as well as its modes of exhibition, reflecting on such matters as the space separating a sound and its caption, the process and the product, the production and the consumption, the evanescence of the sounds. http://www.goranvejvoda.com/ Joachim Montessuis lived in 15 towns since 72, including Bordeaux - Strasbourg - Toulouse - Marrakech - Abidjan - Besançon - Lille - Rotterdam - Cologne. He lives actually in Paris. He grew up surrounded by Buddhist monks, Gnawas musicians and oriental sacred texts that gave him the sense of ritual and trance in music. Since 1993 he has developed a transversal sonic poetry praxis focused on experimental voice processings and immersive concerts-installations. His noise and video events are devised and set in context as panic-poetic spaces in which social/sensorial disturbance and blurring occur, through some extreme crescendos going from silence to wall of sound. He has worked in major European electronic arts centers (CICV, Fresnoy, V2_Lab, KHM) and has presented live performances and installations around the world including places and festivals such as DEAF in Rotterdam, ISEA, ICA in London, Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Sónar in Barcelona, Africa Center in South Africa, Rio de Janeiro, etc. He's been editing ERRATUM since 1997, a small CD+net label devoted to art, noise and experimental sound poetry, and he punctually organises experimental poetic events and exhibitions. He has collaborated with such artists as David Larcher, Faustin Linyekula, Serge Pey, Henri Chopin, Joel Hubaut, Jörg Piringer, Franck Ancel... Jopo Stereo is a writer, radio producer, sound artist, curator and cut-up DJ, Jopo Stereo sound work is as much influenced by early avant guarde cut up work of the 52h century, to the turntablists and DJs of the 80s to today. He blends electronic compositions with field recordings, voices and noises from different musical backgrounds (pop, rock, disco, classical). To create these works, he never uses MIDI, just tapes, a wide variety of microphones, a multi-track recorder and a few effects. He performs on the airwaves, in galleries, clubs, and through sound installations. Jopo Stereo other aliases are : L-R, Radio 3 and a half, SonoTale, Jean-Philippe Renoult. http://www.jeanphilipperenoult.com/ Founded in 1992, RadioMentale can be seen as a sound-system with an influence on the airwaves, clubs, urban spaces, web & art centres. Since the early nineties, RadioMentale have been broadcasting their own ‘ cult’ radio show in Paris on FG (as well as on the Swiss and Japanese radios: ‘Couleur 3’ and ‘Shibuya FM’). They now work on various formats: environmental pieces for contemporary art shows, movie soundtracks, specific sound pieces for radio or urban spaces, multimedia movie performances, 'cinemixes' and sound design for public and corporate venues. A RadioMentale performance or piece is a mix drawing from an eclectic range of audio sources, including movie soundtracks, experimental & electronic music, natural sounds, dialogues, soundcollages. Both artists have been exhibiting and performing in various contemporary art exhibitions and venues such as Documenta X, Pompidou Centre, Le Magasin in Grenoble, Cartier Foundation. Jean-Yves Leloup, born in 1968, lives in Paris. Sound-artist, DJ, author and curator, he co-authored the 'Global Tekno' book and curated the ‘Audiolab’ sound, art and design project. Eric Pajot, born in 1966, lives in Paris. Sound and visual artist, he released several singles and his own DVD, 'Ambiank', he also composed movie soundtracks and has launched the collection DVD by Numbers for Sony Music Video. Véronique Hubert’s approach to her work is “epidemic”*. It is an association of ideas and forms, that are constantly being adapted. She recycles and digests new ideas in order to produce singular combinations. With this attitude she casually mixes Lino Ventura with Gilles Deleuze, comics, silent cinema and silly jokes. Her work shamelessely combines installation, performance, DJing, video and drawing, art and cinema history, Eastern cultures and references to comics, science fiction and documentary aesthetics, sharp design and kitsch images. Véronique Hubert also takes a step back to let others collaborate when she organises parties. From events to exhibitions, her contemporary mix is a fictional universe which can be dreamy, humorous and sometimes upsetting. These parallel worlds are brought together and come to life through as a series of caricatures played by Véronique Hubert, they include the aloof and spineless Mimicry, the hysterical Utopia fairy or the over sensitive Femme Aux Grosses Mains (Woman With Big Hands). These characters stubbornly, but not without irony, re-enact our petty worries, aspirations and daily failures. |
