REVIEW
ÉRIC LA CASA / SLAVEK KWI: Fonderie.Paccard
Collectif & Compagnie | MTS 04 | CD
If anything can be said about this collaboration between Éric La
Casa and Slavek Kwi, it's this: Fonderie.Paccard is as much about process
as it is about the end result. In the summer of 2000, French sound explorer
Éric La Casa made ten hours of stereophonic and multiphonic recordings
at the Paccard bell foundry. With this sound material at his disposal,
he created a work in three parts. He then sends the remaining, unused
sound material to Slavek Kwi, aka Artificial Memory Trace, who creates
his own unique work without any sort of "geophonic" context,
as La Casa would describe it. Kwi creates a work in two parts. Now it
is his turn to return to La Casa his unused sound material, with which
La Casa then begins a new work, which is in turn reworked by Kwi, until
finally the two get together to perform their works in the foundry in
the presence of the workers there.
Whether we can really make heads or tails out of the process is a matter
of little consequence, however, since our experience of these pieces is
limited exclusively to the end result. The disc features 7 tracks in total;
4 by La Casa, 2 by Kwi, and one in collaboration. La Casa's contributions
seem to preserve the integrity of the original recordings. Although I'm
sure the sounds have been isolated, rearranged and layered in various
ways in order to create the pieces we have here, the sounds themselves
seem to have remained as pure field recordings. There are quiet moments,
where La Casa seems to have captured the foundry in its most tranquil
hour (perhaps in the evening when all work has stopped), and still others
where you can here traces of the bells tolling, metal scraping, machines
roaring. Slavek Kwi works much differently, heavily processing and editing
the sounds down to the most minute fragments, or transforming them into
electronic sounds, pulses, tones and textures that seem in large part
divorced from their original sources, then arranging them into the pieces
we have here. Each of these pieces, whether by La Casa or Kwi, or in their
collaborative finale, create their own unique and fascinating sound space.
They simultaneously build and take apart a bridge between the concrete
and acousmatic, between location recordings and decontextualized sound,
between what is real, what we perceive as real, and what can only be imagined.
[Richard di Santo] + collectifetcie.fr.fm
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