Description

Field recordings and electromagnetic improvisations by french artist Pali Meursault.

Pali Meursault is a sound artist, composer and sound designer. His electroacoustic and sound art research takes different shapes: compositions for records, radio works, installations or performances. Environmental sound recording is central in his work, which takes from Musique Concrète and the sonic exploration of soundscapes.

For stridulations, Meursault confronts recorded and performed sounds, composition and improvisation: field- recordings of animal communication (insects, birds and bats recorded in France, Japan and South America over almost ten years) mix and dialog with the ‘sonification’ of fluorescents tubes.

Both the environmental sound matter composition and the electromagnetic instrument have evolved with performances between 2014 and 2017. Little by little, new recordings were collected and new electrical and electronic supplies were added to the setup. The record is altogether the outcome of that process and a different take on the project, leaving the synesthetics of the flickering lights but embracing the deepness of ‘blind’ listening.

For Pali Meursault, the long research for stridulations has been a practice for deconstructing binary oppositions between nature and machine, bio- and anthropo-phony, and instead to explore the strange sonic affinities that exist between some animal voices and technological phenomena. The performances were a way of switching from a contemplative and ideologic relation to the soundscape to a praxis of noise, using animals and electromagnetic sounds as sonic qualities, possibilities, and intensities.