A piece of industrial musique concrète composed in the studios of GRM, created from field recordings of a vinyl record pressing plant:
a mise en abyme of the record as an object.
Press completes a “mechanist” trilogy, started by Pali Meursault with Offset in 2013 and Mécanes in 2016. Following the investigation of gestures and machines cycles in printing and letterpress workshops, this new work is a mise en abyme of the record as an object, created from field recordings of a vinyl record pressing plant: Rand Muzik in Leipzig.
Composed in the studios of GRM, Press is a piece of industrial musique concrète. The microphonic explorations of factory noises, as “byproducts” of the fabrication process, reveal the pulsations, rhythms, frequencies and sequences of an electroacoustic matter that seem to be already pointing to industrial and electronic music. Noise is apprehended as a social and cultural phenomenon, which attests of both a production process and an auditory culture.
The piece fills the first side of the record with three “movements” that correspond to the three main stages of the record fabrication: electrotyping, pressing, and packaging. The second side is a deconstruction of the first one, presenting 33 locked groves. The medium conditions the shape of sound by imposing the never-ending repetition of the 1.8 seconds in take to complete a rotation.
Pali Meursault is a
sound artist,
composer, sound designer, sound engineer and teacher. His electroacoustic research turns into compositions for records, radio pieces, installations, or performances. His approach uses field recordings, inherits from musique concrète, and explores the sound environment to its audible limits: infra et ultrasounds, and electromagnetic phenomena. For over 15 years, he has been carrying his microphones and antenna to industrial and urban places, alpine glaciers or amazonian forests. His last works capture the sounds of workplaces, confronts animal communication and electromagnetic fields, or reveal the hidden sound environment of datacenters.
He is also involved in many collaborations with collectives (∏-Node, Ici-Même), other musicians (Lee Patterson, Frédéric Nogray,
Nicolas Montgermont, Alice Q.) or filmmakers (Lise Fisher, Naïs Van Laer). Alonside these activities, he teaches and writes about sound art.
