Songes/Dreams

Graphic and musical variations

A collaboration between artist/engraver Pierre Cambon and musician/composer Benoit Albert

In an electro-acoustic interpretation of Pierre Cambon’s engravings, composer Benoit Albert creates 12 musical landscapes depicting a series of sleep cycles, with blurred boundaries, where reality and dream mingle in an imaginary world. This music, inspired by art, decisively turns toward research that touches on human intimacy. In that place of dreams, beyond the physical body, is the presence that tries to transcribe, to reveal itself on the surface of Cambon’s copper plate aquatints. Within the music and the prints Albert and Cambon have redefined the classic theme of a model asleep, as a discreet homage to mystery, femininity, and sensuality.

Altérité(s)/Alterity(s)

“Ces gravures, des eaux fortes au trait et en aquatinte parlent de vous, de moi, elles partent de singularités pour s’ouvrir à l’universel. L’individu et le groupe, la foule, entre rapport social, désirs et mortalité… »

Pierre Cambon

“These engravings, etchings and aquatint, are talking about you, me and leave us open for singularities of the universal. The individual, group, crowds, a social relationship, of desires and mortality…”

Pierre Cambon

This artwork was originally published as a limited edition of 25 port-folio containing 5 original “eau forte” and a CD.

Recorded, mixed, edited and mastered in 2008 at Nano Studio – France by Benoît ALBERT

Guitar Lowden O21

SONGES – The composition process:

Six months before Songes, in may 2008, I was premiering the “Ring Triptych”, my first opus featuring guitar and electronic music. At that state of my compositional evolution I didn’t dare to really mix electronic music and guitar.

With Songes, because of the subject and with my previous experience I felt the need to treat the electronic as a true chamber music instrument. I spent three months improvising with a steel string guitar in the studio and recording all the session, I also recorded my voice and playing the guitar with different items like a spoon. With the computer, using the samples from the recording in modular synthesizers, I elaborated musical landscapes (Songe 1 or 4) and melodically and rhythmical interacting ideas (Songe 3 or 6) .

The main scenario was to build 3 evolving sleep cycles of 4 stages each, as the science describes it in theory. Like a movie maker I edited all the “rushes” and built a coherent scenario, working on the ideas of time, cycles, rhythm, space and images.