A collaboration of the sound poet Anne-James Chaton, guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex) and musician Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai): a dense and structured sound design, in which words, rhythms, and melodic loops inexorably blend.
Anne-James Chaton reads almost a litany of portraits of people, built from lists of events and objective facts. The list is set in several languages, deliberately repetitive, and becomes a continuous bass line on which the music builds up. The electronic sound structures of Alva Noto perfectly complement the incursions of Andy Moor's experimental guitar playing. Gradually, the prose, the guitar and machines resonate, culminating in a powerful storm both musical and harmonious.
The text consists of a collection of twenty portraits written throughout the last decade. These almost photographic sketches are fed from textual blueprints which met the author at some point in time: bank statements, subway tickets, restaurant and shopping receipts are rewritten in prose, composed in simple subject-verb-complements. Each piece of information becomes a sentence; all sentences are short and compact, and in fast succession, they gradually shape a story. Portraits of a nurse, a teacher, an educator, a singer, an astronaut, and many others are placed end to end. The assembly of parallel lives creates a continuous thread, providing a path to follow both extreme banality and great adventures. Actions, places and events are melted in the instance of a third person singular with no indication which is its true identity. It is a disturbance with many possible escape routes of dispersion and emergence.
The listener encounters the speeches of German, English, Japanese and other languages which introduce multiple shifts of meaning. The voice becomes pure sensation; in conjoint with the textures and improvisations delivered by the other musicians, it can submerge to the background and re-emerge again, being pure sonic material stripped off of its communicative function. The significance of words is lost in pure performance and proceeds as yet another texture in the sound.
Anne-James Chaton (born in 1970 in Besançon) has developed a multi-polar work, based on a continuous study of the textual materials that punctuate the daily life of contemporary societies. This "poor" literature, produced on a daily basis by a multitude of machines—cash register receipts, museum entrance tickets, leaflets, business cards, credit cards, subscriptions, etc.—constitutes the material for his textual work, which is also used in the production of his work.
The plural and polyglot dimension of his work has led him to develop projects with artists from other scenes and other languages. He has created pieces with Phia Ménard, Sylvain Prunenec, Valeria Giuga, and has written numerous albums with guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), German musician Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto and Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore.
His books are published by Al Dante and P.O.L., his visual works are shown by the Far West Gallery and his sound compositions are published on the German label Noton. Anne-James Chaton was a resident at the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome in 2020. He received the Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou International Prize for Literature in 2022.
