MYSTERY SEA 45 | Mathias Delplanque | [L'inondation]
ARTWORK
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INTRODUCTORY
WORDS
-"In
June 2005, I created a sound installation for the VKS Gallery in Toulouse.
All the sounds used in this piece were recorded in the basement of my
apartment building in Nantes: pipe sounds, electrical buzzes, neons,
draughts, reverberation, air pipes, ventilating fans, etc. This piece
was presented in the basement of the gallery, a dark vaulted cellar
at the bottom of steep narrow stairs. The sound was diffused –
very loud – on a multichannel system, through four loudspeakers
set in each corner. A woofer was set in the centre of the room. It took
a few minutes to get used to the darkness. My father left my mother
that summer. My son Sol was born on the 16th Feb. 2006. The basement
in my parents’ house was flooded during a big storm. Ten inches
of water got the best of all the paintings and drawings from my late
teens that I had kept stored there for years. Nothing was left but shapeless
heaps of ashenlike material. Nothing was visible anymore, but I was
able to save a few pieces set at the top. I stored it all in plastic
waterproof boxes, except a few pieces I took back home with me. Some
objects, drawings and a
small painting of a face – untitled and undated (probably
made around 1991). I didn’t like that painting back then and had
left it unfinished. Now, it’s hanging in the corridor of my flat.
The material presented on this CD is a stereo version of the piece presented
at the VKS Gallery in June 2005."
- Mathias
Delplanque , January 2008
PRESS RELEASE
Burkinabese/French sound artist
Mathias Delplanque is an accomplished musician who has classical
music studies in his rich pedigree, as well as a grade at the Ecole
Nationale d'Arts de Cergy Pontoise & a master's degree in aesthetics
(Paris I university)...
Multifaceted, Mathias has many strings on his bow,
using different identities to explore different paths... LENA sees him
deal with contemporary dub forms, while in BIDLO, he navigates at the
fringes of electronica... He has also done numerous collaborations with
various musicians (Black Sifichi, Ghislain Poirier, Charlélie
Couture, etc...) and released 2 albums (Zeropolis, Hidden Doors) with
THE MISSING ENSEMBLE (John Sellekaers, Daniel De Los Santos) where he
took part into the conception of hallucinogenic hybrid pieces mainly
dealing with the dark corners of our derelicted cities...Under his own
name, Mathias composes soundscapes of a more concrete,
or experimental-ambient nature (“Ma chambre Quand je N'y Suis
Pas [Montréal] on Mondes Elliptiques, “La Plinthe”
imminent on Optical Sound) or conceives works meant for galleries or
art centers (specific installations)...
so far, he has collected many rewards, and has made some artist residencies
in France, Canada, and India...
His MS contribution, is a piece aptly named “L'inondation” which was first presented at the VKS gallery in Toulouse during 2005...all sounds are drifted from the basement of his apartment building in Nantes...
In an enclosed space
where all lights are low
we skip over a dark surface
seeping into the walls
brushed by their reverberations
-
We learn to listen
to new nocturnal chants,
the constant flickering of lamps,
the tiny deflagrations,
the microfluxes of electricity,
the surrounding moistness,
and memories drip,
dragging us back to their inception...
-
“L'inondation” is about letting ourselves
overcome with,
a submersion of the senses,
celebration of the underlying...
TRACKS
01.
L'inondation 
LENGTH
47'56
REVIEWS
VITAL WEEKLY 622|Frans
De Waard
Some people use various artist names,
but then some of them do manage to sound the same throughout. There
is also somebody like Mathias Deplanque who various
incarnations manage to sound very differently. There is the dub of Lena,
the glitch of Bidlo and the electronics of The Missing Ensemble. Under
his own name Delplanque does the 'serious work', dealing
with field recordings and such like such as his great, delicate work
'Ma Chambre Quand Je N'y Suis Pas', dealing with sound of empty spaces
(see Vital Weekly 539). He lives in Nantes and down in his basement
is where he taped all the sounds for 'L'Inondation',
which first presented as a sound installation in 2005. The sounds are,
probably, heavily processed affairs of low humming vibrations and on
top various sorts of machinery, with soft, breaking sounds. Perhaps
I'm all wrong. Perhaps it's the radiator sounds, insects and cars passing
in the background. The forty-seven minute piece is best seen as a piece
of ambient music- music derived from the ambient, using the space as
a resonator and to play his sound. The low mechanical humming is best
played at a lower volume, so that it incorporates your living area perfectly.
I can imagine if you play this at full volume, the music will be too
industrial. At home, a quiet home, the soft sounds from outside will
match Delplanque's perfectly, providing a lower volume.
vital weekly
FURTHERNOISE|Max
Schaefer
This tendency to dote on the
sea, would it be owing to metaphor or metamorphosis? The latter is infinitely
compelling, but then there is that transfixing tale, recounted by Emil
Cioran, of the sea as consisting of God's tears. Hence our desire to
drown in it, as a short-cut to God through His tears. In any case, Mystery
Sea, and its entire catalogue thus far, appears altogether devoted to
its enigma.Substrate,
though spawned from a number of sound sources, is ultimately the sound
of the movement of fluids, balanced yet brimming with tension and friction.
Onodera continually camouflages the electricity
within the flow of a swift pointillism and a Lucier-like harmonic drift,
itself a sort of expulsion of breath, redolent of deep weariness and
shedding of emotion. The work consists of eight pieces that, without
ever quite touching or bumping into each other as though by accident,
quite effortlessly roll and intertwine - in short, they link up without
fusing or showing much concern for contact. The pieces charm for this
birthright, this seemingly natural ability to maintain this magnetic
distance and rapport of form. Everything is highly conventional and
highly regulated. And while this means surprises may well be few and
far between, the opportunity to observe and vanish into the proceedings
is more than ample recompense. Asides from this, the basic force of
these pieces stems not from their accumulation of elements, but from
their subtraction. A sort of classicism may be seen here. There's nothing
flabby about these pieces, nothing ungainly. They move away from their
moorings, leaving fewer and fewer traces, ascending into higher, dreamier
atmospheres, as though out of concupiscence for the sky. When a tinkling
of water reappears at the end, it's as though one has come full circle,
its second occurrence signaling the end of the first. Where Substrate
travels among the stars themselves, l'Inondation
simply charts its course by them. Mathias Delplanque's
recording is steeped in darkness - that of the basement in his apartment
building in Nantes, to be exact. In this place, pipe sounds, electrical
buzzes, ventillation fans and the like follow a trajectory that recurs
time and again, marking time and opening up a space out of which events
swell and recede. Originally a sound installation for the VKS Gallery
in Toulouse, the piece slumbered in that buildings basement, a dark
cellar at the foot of a long, narrow staircase. Perhaps understandably
it achieves its best effect when lodged in a close approximation to
just such a setting. In this environment, everything bristles with age,
deep lines, contours, colors - in brief, a rich decay that overflows
at a constant yet slow, almost imperceptible manner. The rarefied minutiae
of Delplanque's sounds exist in a state of structural
tension against the relentless onwards motion of duration. This ferrets
out a fizzing and crackling that is at first apparent despite itself,
but that eventually seem to strategically seep more and more into the
backdrop, imbuing the piece with a sense of the inevitability of collapse.
furthernoise
WHITE_LINE
| Baz Nichols
"...Next we have another Frenchman,
Mathias Delplanque, whose works under various pseudonyms
and project names see this multi-faceted artist exploring a range of
territories, that encompass both his classical training, and more experimental,
and marginal sides. Here on L’inondation, we
see exhibited a mastery of dark atmospherics, and I mean dark in the
sense of densely populated, rich textural pieces, rather than the doom-laden
affairs perpetuated by the dark ambient school. Essentially, this is
a recording of an installation piece that took place at the VKS gallery
in Toulouse in 2005, a dimly lit space, where Delplanque’s
shimmering atmospherics resonated the very fabric of the building, a
powerfully evocative piece that is rich and reverberant at it’s
core, with various activities booming around the sonic spectrum,, odd
incidents and occurrences, curious knockings and drippings that draw
us into a mysterious and somewhat intriguing [if slightly unsettling]
world.
..."
white_line
TOKAFI
|Tobias
Fischer
On his third solo album, Mathias Delplanque
reminds us that composing drones can be a lot of fun if you treat the
process like gardening: Planting tonal seed on fertile ground, feeding
them with creative manure, harmonic water and notational nutritions,
protecting them from winds of distortion, rhythmic heat and the biting
cold of stasis and watching them gradually grow into mysteriously beckoning
sonic gardens, rich in resonance and with ripe aural fruit hanging from
finely detailed branches.
This approach also implies that everything is a big experiment. On “L’inondation”,
Delplanque uses the first of 47 minutes, originally commissioned
for the VKS Gallery in Toulouse in 2005, to present his material : ominous
sheets of grey hiss, discreet planes of white noise, distant rumblings,
close-up clicks, metallic resonances and airy breaths, familiar sounds
and foreign semblances make for a bizarre and bipolar opening, marking
time and floating freely.
Then, however, as if a mute bullet had escaped the muzzle of a silent
starter’s gun, the elements start moving in a mitotic ballet,
shifting, transforming, deforming and degenerating. A piercingly high-pitched
tone buzzes like an electric razor and the background steamrollers to
the fore. Noise suddenly takes on pitched qualities and harmonic movements
fall apart into shards of dimly controlled din. Links are forming between
disparate events and the piece goes through haunting episodes of cramp-like
fever convulsions.
Gradually, the music recomposes itself, shedding its nightmarish visions
and slowing down its heart rate to a feeble pulse. At the end, the track
is not that different from where it started, but every element seems
calm and cool now, as “L’inondation”
enters a phase of relaxed resignation. Far away, industrial machines
are still pounding loudly, as if brutally breaking bodacious boulders
into tiny fragments of stone, but they, too, disappear into silence,
leaving the listener in a closely circumfined space of subtle sounds,
all within his immediate proximity.
Delplanque has used recordings from the basement of
his home as source material. Some of them are still recognizable as
such, others have mutated into gargantuan proportions. Just as on “Ma
chambre quand je n’y suis pas”, it doesn’t matter
where exactly these noises came from, but what happens to them when
the composer lets go. It’s an approach derived from one of gardening’s
most essential lessons: You can feed a plant with water, but you can’t
make it grow.
tokafi
WONDERFUL WOODEN REASONS|Ian
Holloway
If my reading of the press statement
is correct then at least the bare bones (if not the entirety) of this
remarkable album consists of a recording (or recordings) made from sounds
filtering up from the lower floors of Delplanque's
apartment building. L'inondation consists of all those sounds that are
so exotic and disturbing in a 'silent' house - drips, hisses, clangs
& taps. Sounds that are both amorphous and mundane. For Delplanque
they are the building blocks from which he creates his soundworld. As
you'd expect from that premise there isn't huge scope of material to
be had but those sounds that are available are used to their utmost
and to spellbinding effect.
wonderful wooden reasons
FEARDROP|Denis
Boyer
Tout comme le peintre sait combien
il est difficile de figurer le mouvement par l’immobile, certains
musiciens minimalistes savent combien il est difficile de jouer l’immobilité
avec ce qu’on ne peut arrêter. C’est peut-être
ce point qui fera comprendre un jour la musique par un plus grand nombre
comme un art de l’image. Arrêter le court du son, son déroulement
ontologique dans l’espace et dans le temps, nul n’y est
tenu, car nul n’est tenu à l’impossible. Mais l’artiste
est souvent un tricheur, qui tente de donner le change. Mathias
Delplanque, qui sait distribuer les brillances en musique (Lena),
a aussi sa face obscure, ses replis ténébreux. Au plus
profond de certains d’entre eux, il tente la prouesse que nous
avons décrite. Dans L’inondation par exemple
(comme naguère dans la formation Missing Ensemble), il plonge
dans un goudron filandreux, une nuit de souffle brumeux et de cliquetis
rouillés. Une pulsation rare, peut-être marquant la corrosion,
le poinçonne plus qu’elle ne le rythme. Car le temps n’a
plus le jour avec lui pour marquer l’alternance. Seule la nuit
règne ici. On devine les formes qu’elle caparaçonne,
on se fie à leur bruit avant tout et ce n’est que juste
dans cette sphère souterraine. Atelier soumis à la rotation,
le disque est le lent balancier de sa propre période. Il suinte
comme les caves humides et c’est peut-être finalement le
seul signe qui le fait échapper à sa parfaite immobilité.
feardrop
TOUCHING
EXTREMES |Massimo
Ricci
Like many artists operating in this area, Mathias
Delplanque (of France and Burkina Faso roots) uses different
names according to the fields investigated. In this occasion he chose
to remain visible, having fathered a 47-minute piece that doesn't actually
put forward new crucial answers in the shadowy world of rumbles, roars,
cavernous rivers and remote echoes but, overall, sounds quite impressive
to these ears. In case it wasn't noticed, you just read the ordinary
modus operandi for this kind of submission; yet I did welcome "L'inondation",
as the reviewer's objectiveness still manages to prevail on the urge
of throwing everything away when the building blocks employed are too
comfortable for factual improvement. What the composer features as a
winning card is called "sound placement": Delplanque
is a man who has studied music seriously, and it shows. The imposing
growth of those waves from the underground provides a feel of cataleptic
bliss meshed with a sense of ineluctability disclosing a noticeable
quantity of compositional awareness, usually not likely to be found
in these regions. Also to be valued are the manifest contrasts between
the domineering accumulation of aquatic frequencies and hissing fumes,
and the high-frequency emissions approximating bionic crickets that
emerge from the mix. In short, this is a classic example of non-pioneering
but brilliantly conceived record deserving a dutiful analysis to individuate
its strong points. There are several.
touching
extremes
MUSIQUE
MACHINE | Martijn Busink
Rated
: 4 stars out of 5
Music for installations is not seldom
more experience rather than music. Listened with full attention it might
appear a bit dull, but as an ambiance—a mood—it can work
quite well.
L'inondation is no different, the hoarse subsonic rumblings
take the full playing time to change shape. By the end of the forty
five minutes you realize the sub bass has gone and you moved from a
dungeon into something that seems more like the jungle. The initial
heavy atmosphere felt like a descent into a dark cave or tunnel. A dark
ambient mood, with a slow but steady pace and various rumblings that
suggest mysterious activities in the dark. You find yourself surrounded
by these deep meditative sounds, while there's an electronic hiss that
tickles the eardrums and has an interesting effect when you move your
head. This hiss, transplanted from the context of the dungeon into the
jungle, changed into what seems the 'insect electronica' of SE Asia.
Even though the original multi-channel piece has been mixed down to
stereo, I think that L'inondation is as ominous and
spacious as possible on only two channels, by a keen use of frequencies.
Spooky but also strangely soothing, L'inondation, makes
an excellent drone piece to play preferably at night
musique machine
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