Month: October 2024

Les Anciens (The Elders) is part of a larger electroacoustic (acousmatic) work by Stéphane Borrel called Laughing Tonalities. The work uses as its essential sound material the laughter from recordings of three hundred invited participants.

Stéphane writes, “The musical writing – based on very precise sound selection, manipulation and editing – brings into focus the timbres, the rhythms and the pitches of this material. In addition, it takes into account a more evocative side which consists of recreating “plausible” scenes or portraits that highlight the different laughter types.

Les Anciens (The Elders) brings together two people who, in reality, have never met. Behind the touching scene, the couple’s good humour, their half-hearted understanding, we must also feel the laughter at the pain, almost a nasty cough; at the end, his breathing stops, then her breathing – insects and birds remain. This is one of the pieces from the Laughing Tonalities cycle which deals with the theme of ‘ages of life’.

I probably won’t choose… but if I could choose, I would like to end up like them: sitting outside on a beautiful evening, ‘comforted by the insensibility of nature’, as Milan Kundera writes, ‘because insensibility is consoling; the world of insensibility is the world outside human life; it is eternity; it is the sea gone with the sun [« c’est la mer allée avec le soleil » Arthur Rimbaud]. […] the gently inhuman beauty of the world before or after the passage of men.'”

Stéphane Borrel lives and works in Lyon, France. He writes for different ensembles and diverse electronics, ranging from chamber music to the symphony orchestra, from mixed music to sound installations or acousmatic pieces. He teaches composition at Conservatoire de Lyon. Learn more about Laughing Tonalities on Instagram.

Dreams calm down our worries. We overcome extreme experiences with the flood of feelings that our mind reworks each night. During the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion, water flowed through Ukrainian dreams. Recurring rains, floods and images of the seaside from the audio archive at the Center for Urban History inspired Yevhenii Poliakov to make a collage.

“We learned to live against the current. Now, when we, the survivors, our relatives and friends, are reaching the other shore, the premonitions from our dreams become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The word ‘victory’ sounds too noisy. The silence that falls after is deafening since we are afraid of what comes next.”

Yevhenii Poliakov is an independent artist and researcher from Lviv, Ukraine

Interviews from video and audio recordings of students from the Ukrainian Catholic University, their parents and teachers. The talks took place between March and August 2022. They are part of the thirty hour audio archives ‘Diaries and Dreams of War’ at the Center for Urban History in Lviv

The project was supported by a scholarship from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna as a part of the “Documenting Ukraine” initiative.