Matisse Vrignaud

Produced in collaboration with Studio AA for the reopening of the LU Tower in Nantes, this generative sound installation follows the permanent exhibition retracing the four lives of the Lieu Unique: the factory, the squat, the renovation, the cultural institution. As a true architectural emblem of Nantes, the LU Tower seemed to deserve special attention, a contemporary reinterpretation of its history, to make it exist in our current cultural imagination. This four-year exhibition is currently open to the public.

Created by the design studio Studio AA, and installed in the center of the LU tower, the two luminaires take up the symbolism of the chandelier and reveal themselves along the staircase. Made of materials echoing the tower's industrial past, they emphasize the verticality of the building and transform it into a space for strolling and contemplation. Integrating both light strips and loudspeakers, these chandeliers form “voice and face” of the tower.

The tower, more vertical than horizontal, requires the speaker to be placed "in elevation", which restricts the sensation of displacement of the sources, the human ear being more sensitive to horizontal rather than vertical movements. In order to get around this issue, each level forms an acoustic cage in which the sounds reverberate differently, emphasizing the idea of distance, and therefore of height.

The speakers are tilted outwards for two reasons:

• to limit the number of first reflections on the landings, allowing for a more diffuse and pleasant sound for reading. In effect, the tower is split into two parts: the exhibition area, and the listening area - on the stairs.
• in order to ensure a good restitution of the stereo pairs on the platforms of the stairs.

The movements of the sources must preserve both a character of novelty and consistency. To remedy the problem, I developed a microphone placement that allowed me to record objects in sequences, avoiding the appearance of sound "gaps" between the microphones (volume drop), and therefore between the speakers. Each of the tracks of these quadraphonic recordings is then placed on the eight speakers according to the "transversal" spatialization principle explained below.

The composition, while guiding the visit, takes up anecdotes from the life of the building, however, avoiding any figuration, using them more as implicit memories. It is divided into four parts. They tell each one a different period of the life of the place, described below. Like the voice of the building, this generative, "living" composition, always evolving, recomposes itself indefinitely and dialogues with the sounds of the outside life: from cars to pedestrians, trains and ambulances, these form an additional layer to the music that makes their expressions musical. This method of composition echoes the way in which we appropriate history, not as a fixed concept, but as something that is still active and flexible in our minds, subject to the views and experiences of each individual.

Ciel Ouvert (Open Skies)
Historical anchor: the squat
Fugitive layers of sound travel through the chandeliers in sinuous trajectories. The sun, the rain, the birds, enter this once open-air building.

Les Cires (The Waxes)
Historical anchor: the factory
Popular European music from the beginning of the 20th century recorded on wax cylinders is distorted, cut up and recomposed.

Sève (Sap)
Historical anchor: the rehabilitation.
A few sounds repeatedly go up and down throughout the chandeliers, building space, in a moment that seems to have stopped.

Sémaphore (Semaphore)
Historical anchor: the institution
An harmony of many instruments is built progressively, intensifies, and modulates itself, to finally disappear slowly.

Principles of composition

❶ Timbral diversification
The instruments are replaced regularly. Each new listening offers different timbral characteristics.

❷ Modulation
The sound material is constantly altered according to different parameters. These evolve within a predefined range.

❸ Phasing
Loops of unequal duration are overlapped, producing silences and convergences in the composition.

Spatialization principles

① Horizontal
Movements on the stereo pairs allowing to treat the floors as independent sound spaces.

② Vertical
Short sounds, repeated on each floor, giving the sensation of height by the generated change in volume and reverberation.

③ Transversal
Four-track sequences travel through the tower, and deliver a more articulate, intentional sound.

Ici et Maintenant is intended as a manifesto, as an example of an object that allows us to modulate our relationship to time and space, to reconstruct the imagination of our stories. It is also a music that goes on throughout life. What do we want to see and hear of space and time? A verticality, an horizontality, an expansion, a compression, a fragmentation or on the contrary, a unity? A speed, a slowness, an acceleration, a slowing down? For all these characteristics, a building is told to oneself and by each one, through the course that each one will choose.