Martux_m About Michel Chion

 

All of M. Chion’s work is a “painting with sounds,” a transfer of a visual image onto the acoustic plane, an art of sounds. In this art of sounds, “the ear” becomes the primary mediator, “listening” becomes one of the most important compositional characteristics, “composing by listening.”

Then emerges the essential relationship, the complicity of sight with listening, to seek what is the object of a forgetfulness of memory, of an imaginable in imagination, of an unthinkable in thought. M. Chion’s compositions seem to be a literature without letters, a dis-writing, and his entire work confirms that one cannot make music with music anymore, just as one cannot make theater with theater, or cinema with cinema, but that one must create interludes that are foci of creation, to be a stranger in one’s own language.

Creating a “disjunctive articulation,” a hidden language, where affections move, become catapulted.

“If the function of sight consists in doubling, splitting, multiplying, that of the ear consists in resonating, making resonate,” says M. Chion, and in my opinion, in a creation that is not communication, but resistance.

Composers like Chion seem to proceed through crises, fractures, shocks, there is always something seismic in every work, a line never regular, but a multilinear whole, a movement between intersections, inflections in a state of tension towards something that is neither syntactic nor related to language; which brings forth percepts, affects, images apparently.

Chion’s sound images are the impossible that in turn becomes possible, worthy sensitive aggregates of echoes and resonances existing among themselves, of disjointed spaces, in every small portion of sound infinite possible ways are produced, sonorous contiguities linked in a tactile manner, the only truth that seems to emerge lies in a production of existence.

Sound is a naked, transparent body, embracing us leading us to a foreign land, towards that mystery to which every caress tends, that digs and searches, in that secret that is enclosed in extreme nudity, present in every erotic relationship. Chion’s work seems to “fixate” in the place of change, to position itself on boundaries that open towards “other,” evoke an expressive value that does not possess a body without multiplying it in the system of reflections and does not inspire sounds without projecting it into the intensive system of resonances; revoking a corporeal uniqueness, re-describing the itinerary of one’s “feeling,” whose primary concern is not to define the thing heard or seen, but to attempt to penetrate its mystery, its undeniable complexity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  .