The music on this long-awaited solo vinyl album by legendary tape artist Jérome Noetinger was recorded live in the studio with no overdubs. Signals were sent through tube broadcast monitors and picked up with room microphones.
Long-time touchstone of international experimental music presents his monolithic (and first) solo vinyl
Sur quelques mondes étranges on Felix Kubin's Gagarin Records. Jérôme Noetinger is known to most for the audio-visual trio Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine, alongside his countless recorded & live collaborations, compositions for radio & stage, and breathtaking multi-channel diffusions in the acousmatic tradition.
Discovering the ReVox B77 tape machine as his tool for live electro-acoustic music in 1987, Noetinger has doggedly investigated his instrument over 35 years, establishing him as a vital contemporary composer/performer of the medium. His work is radical and interrogatory, using a pan-historical array of analogue devices to construct soundworlds which sidestep digital monochrome, landing in a galaxy of simmering malfunction, dynamic physicality & rhythmic debris. Programming Le 102 in Grenoble for over a decade, as well as directing Metamkine distribution for over three, his encyclopaedic knowledge of manifold sonic traditions is on display here; unified by a staunch discipline, impressive dedication and flat rejection of empty trends.
The results synthesise his tireless timbral research into 11 striking sonic investigations which combine modern studio possibilities with years of performance experience worldwide. An ominous malaise hovers over proceedings; yet it never feels nihilistic, presenting solutions which electrify the listener with ecstatic discovery. The perceptual orchestration therein - from throwing our ears right against the body of the tape machine to flinging them into cavernous space alive with the aurally strange - is both delirious & calming. Noetinger is all too aware things are bad, but his drive for discovery and joyous belief in music somehow coruscates brilliantly through contemporary gloom.
Meticulously recorded & produced with Tobias Levin in Hamburg, Sur quelques mondes étranges presents a detailed & rich vocabulary both real & unreal: gesture & repetition, structure & collapse, familiar & uncanny all dance with each in the most pumping discothèque concrète in this universe. This is a powerful and exacting statement from an elegant composer & extraordinary musician who has humbly dedicated his life to his practice.
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Anthony PaterasJérôme Noetinger (born 1966 in Marseille) is a composer, improviser and sound artist who works with electroacoustic devices such as the ReVox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, analogue synthesizers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones, various electronic household/everyday objects and home-made electronica.
In his long career as a sound experimenter, he has collaborated and performed with many artists, including
Sophie Agnel, Angelica Castello, Antoine Chessex, Tom Cora,
Michel Doneda,
eRikm,
Giuseppe Ielasi,
Lê Quan Ninh,
Lionel Marchetti, MIMEO,
Anthony Pateras, Anne-Laure Pigache,
Aude Romary, Keith Rowe,
Mathieu Werchowski as well as ensembles such as Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine, Le Un, Hrundi Bakshi, Les Sirènes and Proton.
From 1987 to 2018, Jérôme Noetinger was the director of Metamkine, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the distribution of improvised and electroacoustic music. Until 2014, he regularly contributed to
Revue & Corrigée, a quarterly journal of contemporary sound, poetry and performance, which he had co-founded in 1989. He was also a member and programming co-ordinator of exhibitions, gigs, and experimental cinema at le 102 rue d'Alembert, Grenoble from 1989-1999.
See also
Thymolphthalein (Natasha Anderson, Will Guthrie, Jérôme Noetinger, Anthony Pateras & Clayton Thomas).
