songs and electronics

Le concert Echoes & Lines est né de la rencontre de deux passionnés d’exploration. Lola et Yukao se sont croisés tard dans la nuit, dans un club de la scène électronique berlinoise. Elle venait du Danemark, avec des rythmes nordiques pétillants et des mélodies mélancoliques – lui venait de France, porté par un imaginaire visuel foisonnant.

La musique électronique s’articule autour de pulsations captivantes, de couches en boucle jouées en direct, d’échantillons de violoncelle et d’une voix aux accents de mélancolie nordique, murmurant les rêves cachés du cœur à la tombée de la nuit.

Les paroles abordent les liens tourmentés, l’interaction homme‑machine, la nostalgie des havres de nature, les instants vécus dans l’obscurité, et la quête de libération comme de métamorphose.

Les visuels prolongent l’atmosphère des chansons et l’enrichissent pour créer un voyage musical plus intense. Générés en direct, ils accompagnent chaque morceau et donnent vie à un univers plein d’imagination. Mélange d’effets génératifs et de créations graphiques en temps réel, ces visuels captivent l’attention du public. 

_{Voix, violoncelle et composition: Lola Ajima
Vidéo: Yukao Nagemi}

Que mon bien aimé entre dans son jardin

musical and graphical performance

version française

This show is a journey through a musical and visual landscape on the theme of human or spiritual love, as it is often expressed in poetry or song. Through a series of tableaux sung and accompanied on the cello with electronics, and drawn on stage, the spectator is accompanied in the discovery of fine and varied facets of the declensions of love: physical, sublimated, spiritual, affective, romantic… A unique, subtle and delicate experience of one of humanity’s great mysteries, which concerns us all.

The music is made of original songs newly composed. In addition to our own verses, the lyrics are taken from spiritual poems from various religious or pagan sources. These texts contain many images and metaphors. More specifically, the strong connection with nature and pastoral life have been a source of inspiration. These words, like ancient tales, due to their universal messages, are still relevant today, and can encourage us not only to develop our affective relationship with others or with a deity, but also to rediscover the deep interlacing between ourselves and nature.

The texts are sung in Danish, French and English, drawing on the singular musicality of these languages to develop a fine, delicate, multilingual and multicultural lyricism. Each text is accompanied by visuals suggesting the dazzle of love and its connection with nature and the elements. They offer a timeless poetic experience of one of the great ideals of the human adventure: love and its many variations throughout life.

_{Les éblouissements de l’amour (The dazzle of love) is a project of live audiovisual performance by the duo Lola and Yukao Meet.
Voice, cello, composition: Lola Ajima
Performative drawing, digital effects: Yukao Nagemi
Duration: 50 minutes}

audio-visual performance

Version française

Völuspá is an unusual audiovisual performance. It is inspired by a dramatic Nordic tale that describes the birth of the world, its violent destruction and out of the chaos a world is born anew. The octophonic electroacoustic composition, combined with the expressive lamentations of voice and cello, surrounds the audience in a soundscape. The video projection on a circular surface on the floor is at the center of the audience. Digital painting mixes with performative ink and drawing. The images, both digital and analog, and the immersive sound composition plunge the audience in a primitive ritual evoking ancient ceremonies in a circle around a fire.

In the Nordic pagan religion, the Poetic Edda, we find Völuspá. She was a shaman, a sacred woman who could enter a shamanic trance, while announcing the images of the cosmological tale she saw in her trance. She would describe how the world was born from the winds of the cosmos and the tree of life, with the waters and winds flowing peacefully, bringing life. Then the world became violent and conflicted between the gods, with rivers turning to ice and the black sun appearing in the sky. The world succumbed violently to a great war. Then a new world was reborn, like a cycle of ever apparent order born of chaos.

We transform the myth of Völuspá into a live digital musical and graphic performance. The atmosphere is intense, dark and expressive, and the performance is semi-narrative. We propose a hybrid performance that echoes the ancestral myth through our contemporary concerns and the potential dystopian fate of our planet. The seeress plays a crucial role in the story, acting as a medium between the human world and divine cosmology, heralding a future redemption. Is such an ending still possible today in our disenchanted world? The performance space is designed so that the audience sits in a circle and can be immersed in the octophonic composition and hypnotic live voice/cello loop. The audience is seated around the area where a visual performance takes place on the floor, using ink, digital effects and the manipulation of natural elements.

_{Völuspá is a project of live audiovisual performance by the duo Lola and Yukao Meet.
Voice, cello, octophonic composition: Lola Ajima
Performative drawing, digital effects: Yukao Nagemi
Duration: 45 minutes
Voluspa is supported by Château Ephémère and ADAGP}

audio-visual performance

generative nights is an audio-visual performance about the exploration of a dark urban world in which humanity struggles with infinitely replicating micro-machines. Their growth and bursts are hypnotic and scaring. The visuals and sounds are rhythmically coupled by equipping the visual display with sensors. They capture the “light” on the surface and convert it into sounds according to their positions on the display. Just think of the graphics as a huge sequencer of one million interconnected cells with light sensors that capture the activity in some selected places of the image.

Based on cellular automata, the first part of generative nights is a unique experience of mechanical audio and graphical patterns. The steady rhythms and the pixellized visuals combine into pictures that evoke industrial halls, cities at night, or a biologist’s lab bench. Humanity progressively takes control over the machine in the second part. The haunting vocals turn gigantic primitive totems into goddesses who take care of the city at night. Moved by the shamanic rhythms of the loops, luminous vestals and flying guardians, half yamakasi/half angels, haunt the buildings while the sleeping city traverses its dreams of fame and wrath. Alas! mankind freed from its mechanical slavery is caught back by its demons of power and vanity in the last part of the piece. Huge machines with long traces traverse the screen and seem planned to cause death.

The drawing machine brings the performer’s limbs into play but fails as Deus ex Machina. The hand of fate traps the melancholic solitary wanderer, while scaring shadows are cast over burning ruins. A flying horse carries the loner’s soul towards better skies and the landscape disappears progressively under tumorous shapes. The chant for a better life is hopelessly covered by an uproar of uncontrolled mechanics.

Media: Lola: voice, sound effects, loops, generative sounds, Yukao: tablet and pen drawing, generative graphics, drawing machine

audio-visual performance — duration 36′
sound: Supercollider, Renoise & samples from freesound / graphics: Porphyrograph / interaction: pure data
 
downloadable video trailer for generative nights
downloadable portfolio for generative nights

audio-visual performance

Version française

Alchemy, once a science of metals and a philosophy of life, is now seen as the deep drives of our unconsciousness, heritage of our archaic culture and common past. Transforming silhouettes suggest the deep changes that our souls can undergo through the alchemical mutation. Hot fusions and frozen cascades materialize the chemical processes that once occurred in the forges, and now take place in our unconscious… Inside us, another logic takes place. It is expressed by repeating rituals, while intertwined streams of dreams and voices burst in a strict, yet non-transparent, order. Just to remind us how strongly we are connected to these transformations and how much they can impact our lives.

The graphical performance is a live video of evolving patterns, flowing pixels, and manual drawing on a tablet. The resulting scenes of an unprecedented aesthetics offer an new vision of postmodern digital media which combines hypnotic electronic effects with sensitive and expressive hand drawing. Four scenes illustrate the deep mutations that alchemy can make us experience: an abyssal fall into our deep unconscious, the gathering with our ancestors who perform a Danse Macabre (Dance of Death), the transmutation of our souls through the encounter of an ambivalent mermaid, and last, in a reverse cosmogony, we reach a pacified and aerial new form of life.

The musical performance is based on loops and rhythms. Like repeating breath and heartbeats they sustain the composition and become a driving force for the trance. The musical and sound piece is built on emotional and expressive voice and cello performance. Inspired from the alchemical transformation, it traverses the four stages of a crisis: chock, reaction, process, and new orientation. The rhythm is made by concrete sounds from a forge, from machines, from nature forces, while the singing and the augmented cello perform repetitive songs with inspiration taken from ritual tribal chants and old working songs. The lyrics are in English and Danish.

Media: Lola: voice, sound effects, loops, generative sounds, Yukao: tablet and pen drawing, generative graphics

audio-visual performance — duration 32′
sound: Ableton Live / graphics: Porphyrograph

Carl Jung & Alchemy in C. Jung Resources
Alchemy and the Hermetic Tradition (Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung) in Cerenity Now

audio-visual performance

terrains vagues wandering is an audiovisual performance with live electric cello, speech and sound samples, performative drawing augmented with digital effects and the manipulation of a bonobo toy. The project is based on the collection of tweets sharing common hashtags. It illustrates the harmful effects of spread of ideas in society. On these information wastelands, the performance offers an audiovisual poetry made of despaired cello laments and performative drawings about the dystopian social pressure. The bonobo toy shares the graphics scene, sacrifices its fragile innocence of endangered species and mirrors our own vulnerability.

The narration is based on the collection of shared hashtags in tweets leading to #stateofemergency. The performance starts with flashes of social climbers combined with advertising or counseling speech samples. It then traverses conflicts and wars to end up in a surveillance society controlled by the state of emergency. The noisy information space from which the tweets were extracted is represented visually by mixed moiré images from the media. It is also evoked by the noisy loops of microsamples extracted from corporate speech or mainstream music collected from the hashtags.

audio-visual performance — duration 32′
sound/graphics: Porphyrograph / interaction: pure data

downloadable video trailer for terrains vagues wandering (mp4) (3’28)
downloadable portfolio for terrains vagues wandering (pdf) (en)

Reference: Carney, Phil, and Vince A. Miller. Vague spaces. In Jansson, André, and Amanda Lagerkvist, eds. Strange spaces: Explorations into mediated obscurity, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (2009): 33-56.