For their first collaboration, Marc Baron and Éric La Casa decided to examine representation from the angle of "counterfeiting", in order to think about our relationship to recording and the archive. It's a question of countering the way we fix reality, as if to get rid of all realism.
"In September 2023, at the Hiventy laboratories in Joinville-le-pont—formerly Pathé—we recorded the film restoration (image and sound) and development processes. Following the mechanical and digital processes, we listened to and interviewed the technicians to understand what goes into restoring a film. How do you restore a film to its original state? To do this, we need to get close to what viewers of the film could perceive in the cinema. The way we look at and listen to a film has evolved since the birth of cinema. Today, wouldn't they want an 8K dolby atmos print ? We are now used to increasingly accurate digital sound and images. So the first version of a film on an analogue medium, which seemed like an archive and a fixed point in our memory, is in fact just a fragile memory in an ever-changing world.
Based on our field recordings, in the small rooms of the laboratories, we carried out destructive re-listening sessions. Marc, with his magnetic tapes, his analogue and even mechanical treatments (demagnetisation), and his multiple loudspeakers, puts them in abime in the space of his studio. At the same time, Eric records both the moment when the replayed original begins to transform or even disappear, and its reappearance in Marc's studio space. Our dynamic listening produces a permanent interplay with the gestures and spaces of the laboratory and our own studio. At every moment, we explore the multiple possible representations of the world contained in listening to a single recording. How do the tools of sound recording and restoration attempt to represent the world, even as the materiality of that world is constantly changing?"
Marc Baron (born 1981) is a Paris-based musician and composer of music for loudspeakers.
He has collaborated with
Mark Vernon,
Jean-Philippe Gross, Lucio Capece,
Jean-Luc Guionnet,
Bertrand Denzler, Stéphane Rives... His work has been published on Cathnor Records, Potlatch, Moremars, Erstwhile Records, Glistening Examples.
For more than 20 years, while listening to the environment, Éric La Casa (born 1968, Tours, lives and works in Paris) has been questioning the perception of reality and has expanded the notion of what's musical today. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music. As a result of his in situ listening processes, he creates forms (of attention) that creep into the venues, slowly infuse there, and become other possible spaces. In the same way that the letter stimulates a country's reading, the in situ aesthetic object renews our relationship to space and landscape.
