Enfer

"To cross Acheron is to feel, within one's depths and by the slow movement of existence's recoil, a sense of mounting anguish 'that draws nearer and pulls back further every time, heavier and more engorged every time' (Artaud). To be in hell is to be forced to live upside down—according to a naive vision of the antipodes—and to think that the Underworld equals the Underside. The world here is inverted and we sink into it like a spinning top whose tip is attracted toward a center buried deep, where there lives "a vile worm boring into the world".
These tips exist within our flesh like burning craters where "bitter thoughts", those nightmares that escape through cracks in the subconscious, emerge and erupt. It is at this point in the circle where the infinite loop of our pain emerges, our irreparable wounds, that I chose to situate Hell: that inescapable route of one-way paths we are pushed through by contradictory forces, where the punishment is the logical consequence of our mistakes—and our body the narrowest of prisons. The journey ends with a final, almost grid-like collapse, like the instinctive gesture of the diver who, touching the bottom, strikes it in order to resurface. Hell is also a sonic world which words remain incapable of expressing completely. Sound pierces the skin in one fell swoop and sucks us in through this orifice toward an interior within which we find the milky void that belongs to dreams.
As it would have been absurd to try to circumscribe the work, I had to give up enumerating the circles and chose instead seven moments entitled constraints, thus underlining the aspect of inevitability.
Finally, fearing of pleonasm, I took some extracts from Dante's text which I then placed contrary to the music so that they would splatter it with their solitary splendor. I decided not to process the actor Michel Hermon's voice musically, leaving it raw, stripped of the drama which certain sound sequences attire themselves with instead."
Bernard Parmegiani