Sound & Lecture N°18: Displacing Sounds at exploratorium / Thursday, 7.4.2022

The violinist and music ethnologist Anouck Genthon is a guest in the Sound & Lecture series, together with the drummer David Meier and the vocalist Antoine Läng. The title of the evening moderated by Mathias Maschat is Displacing Sounds – Music through Space and Tradition. The title refers to two projects by Anouck Genthon, which will be presented in conversation and partly also in concert, and which are both based in the broadest sense on listening to specific acoustic and cultural spaces and taking up and transforming them artistically.

With Antoine Läng, Anouck Genthon published the book Fictation (Edition Gamut) in 2020, which is the result of a year of listening at Le Parc Beaulieu. It’s about bout listening and the different paths our sensation and understanding of a place follow through the ever-changing experience of sound, although happening in familiar environments and with the same vocabulary. They ask what and how we actually hear.

In the duo project with David Meier, specific sound practices of Tuareg music are the starting point; they are based on ethnomusicological studies that Anouck Genthon carried out ten years ago. Featuring violin and percussion, they relate to the anzad (one-string Tuareg fiddle) and the tendé (drum on mortar). Starting from their own instrumental practice, they expand the perception of the sounds of these instruments and develop a new language that allows the music to merge into a continuum in constant transformation. This process is the subject of the conversation.

In addition to the presentation of this duo project, the concert part also consists of a solo performance by Antoine Läng for voice and prepared Jaw harp entitled Idiophasies – ces gestes qui ne se répètent que pour mieux m’échapper (‘Idiophases – these gestures, which are only repeated to better escape me’). It focuses on changes through repetition and exhaustion, from same gestures to making different sounds with their own modulation, length, duration, harmonic path and fragility.

Born in France, Anouck Genthon is a violinist, improviser and ethnomusicologist based in Geneva (CH). She anchors her work in the development of her own improvised language through the experience of sound and listening. She likes to engage in transversal forms of research forms and she plays in various contexts at the crossroads of improvised, experimental, contemporary, electroacoustic and traditional music through different projects from solo to large ensembles. She is the author of Fictation (Gamut, 2020) and Tuareg Music. From political symbolism to aesthetic singularization (L’Harmattan, 2012).

Living in Geneva, Antoine Läng is a vocalist and composer working with the voice, its rooting in a body and in a space, with the breath and the physical mechanisms that can produce sound gestures in resonance with the body and the place in which they happen. This relationship to space is currently being extended to other features of his musical work, with Olga Kokcharova (duo Kokhlias and Loulan) or with Anouck Genthon (Fictation, Songwalk with me), mainly oriented towards listening and receiving places envisaged as sound spaces that the performance aims to make heard.

Drummer and composer David Meier has been working with the internationally active Swiss band Schnellertollermeier since 2006, which plays uncompromising music between modern composition, minimal music, improvisation and rock music. In a duo with the synthesizer and computer musician Ramon Landolt, he works in the border area between electronic and acoustic music. In a duo with Anouck Genthon, in the Zimmerlin-Stoffner-Meier and Meier-Hanes-Amberg trios and various other ensembles, he explores the possibilities of drums in the context of improvised music.