Combining installations, sonic interventions and online publications, the ‘Belju’ project aimed at examining the border area between the Canton du Jura in Switzerland and the Territoire de Belfort in France, through various ways of listening, recording and playback.
In the course of short-time residencies, each artist was invited to wander in that territory and document aspects of his/her experience of the border. Beyond the political borders these soundscapes reveal various other types of ambiguous borders: between nature and man-made environments, knowledge and feeling, figuration and abstraction…

“Dalle sur sous-sol – Nappe interieure” is a composition by Gilles Aubry based on audio recordings from a construction site of a private villa in Rebeuvelier, a village at the Swiss-French border. The process documented here is the casting of a slab of concrete using two hydrophones. Following the steps of the working process, the microphones were successively plundged into fresh concrete, fixed to working machines and attached to various vibrating structures.

“L’Avenir nous le dira” is a composition by Gilles Aubry based on an interview with a inhabitant of Delle, a border-town between Switzerland and France. The voice alludes to emptiness and void, as well as to the hope for future economical re-development in the region…

Download the 15 tracks of the project HERE

2013 / 15 tracks (web-release) / http://belju.universinternational.org /

Staged as a performance in the most pompous Soviet-style, the rehearsal is directed by an invisible amplified voice, commanding to the singers, soldiers and even the church’s bell what to do. In the foreground, the voices of extras and tourists seem to have very different preoccupations:
…need to call the office… need to buy cigarets…soldiers, 900 people…100 meters straight and then to the left…please make a list and we’ll make a decision…we have to stay here until 22h without drinking or eating anything, that’s terrible…please stand there, young man, and look at me, I want to take a picture… we don’t give a shit, we’ve been waiting for 3 hours and we can’t see the end…

Thanks to Natasha Kandinskaya for the translation from Russian.

Download the full track with the complete “Somewhere on the Edge” compilation by various artists on gruenrekorder HERE
2012 / 1 track / 12:01 / www.gruenrekorder.de

The sounds are combined with a voice enunciating the list of common names of central-European singing birds. The profanation of law and authority in public space by the masked rioters appears here as an attempt to playfully escape their ‘names’ allotted to them by a disciplinary apparatus – a concept borrowed from Giorgio Agamben’s essay « What is a dispositif ?».

Download the full track on the following HERE

2011 / 1 track / 10:16 / http://www.silenceradio.org

The Redemption camp of the Redeemed Church of God (RCCG) in Lagos, home to many residential apartments, educational institutions, hospitality units and a few banks, hosts the Holy Ghost Congress twice a year. The congress offers a six-day programme of praise, worship, scriptural exposition, prayers and personal ministrations. 500’000 worshippers gather for all-night programmes in the almost one kilometer long RCCG church to celebrate Jesus in a festival-like atmosphere. Echoes of Light & Darkness documents this sound environment and the echoes which originate from the hundreds of loudspeakers installed in the church.

2010 / 1 track / 14:46 / http://globalprayers.info

Les écoutis le caire’ is a dual work that comprises a sound composition by Gilles Aubry and a poetic text in French by Stéphane Montavon. Materials for both elements were collected during a six-week residency in Cairo in February and March 2007.

The sound piece is based on the principle of ‘indirect listening’ to a busy city soundscape. It features recordings of several enclosed spaces chosen for their resonant properties and predominantly silent contexts : a bathroom, a market hall, a basilica, a courtyard, a refrigerator and a parking house. Throughout the piece the identification of the sound sources remains uncertain, as the distant hubbub of life in the streets diffuses inside the recorded spaces. Such ambiguity – further extended through the editing process – requires that the listener pay closer attention, and at the same time allows for a more intense musical experience.

The textual counterpart to the audio work is presented as a large wordmap that drifts through the various recording locations, as well as other places in Cairo. Rendering the rhythmical confrontations of diverse urban situations, the text focuses on their audiovisual discrepancies. In its fragmentary way, the poem sketches some of the city’s acoustical configurations, also taking aural snapshots of characters and scenes. These singular encounters are woven into a partial word-tapestry of gestures, images and sounds, providing a complementary glimpse into another indirect, though equally voyeuristic, form of listening to the city.

2010 / 2 tracks / 52:45 / Label: Gruenrekorder (Gruen061) / ORDER HERE

s6t8r is a composition based on empty rooms recordings in a former experimental music venue in Berlin (Stralau 68). Sounds from the surroundings are resonating inside the building, ‘coloured’ by the specific acoustics of each room. Space is represented here as fluctuating matter, rather than as stable geometric volume. The piece documents at the same time the recording process which is responsible for this transformation.

4 color letterpress sleeve designed and printed by ben owen.

2009 / 3 tracks / 42:00 / Label: windsmeasure (wm16) / ORDER HERE

Living in Berlin since 2002, Gilles Aubry spent the winter of 2006 recording backyards of the city, originally intending to explore the resonant frequencies of these spaces wich coloured the different sound sources as natural effects processors. He later became more aware of their function as spaces that stayed in between the public and the private sphere, spaces of neighbouring interaction and social control, a sort of negative architecture that hosted vital technical equipments to the buildings and the city itself — ventilation, trash and recycling containers, electric power stations, etc.

These almost organic functions of the city — breathing, digestion and excretion — the near invisibility of the inhabitants, the cycles and variations in lighting, sound, smell and mood over the day and the presence of wild life in the middle of the city, started modifying his perception of space and architecture. The houses were becoming bodies or machines, almost beings, each with its own presence and voice.

Berlin Backyards reconstructs these environmental recordings in eight movements of a musique concrète piece that presents a subjective view of these voices — der Gesang der Gebäude — and of Aubry’s experience in a composition that is much more than a mere acoustic representation of the spaces themselves.

2008 / 8 tracks / 49:00 / Label: cronica electronica (cronica036) / ORDER HERE

The 3 pieces by Gilles Aubry (Volutes I-III) are generative compositions for computer. Each of them is based on the exploration of a different sound fragment, involving chance operations and feedback systems.
The programming with its imperfections and surprises is presented here in a raw gesture without further editing.
The pieces come along with 3 other mini-cdr by Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann and Ignaz Schick under the name Berlin Electronics

very ltd. & numbered edition
hand painted / acryl on cardboard

2008 / 3 tracks / 17:23 / Label: absinth records (015) / SOLD OUT

“MONNO is one of europe’s most interesting and innovative avant-garde band at the moment” CRYPTIC MADNESS

“A new record by MONNO is always a tectonic event in the world of avant rock. (…) They have left their marks on many music fanatics skin by being unpredictable, consequential and without compromise” MONOCHROME

“The band butter their sandwiches with blood, replenish their thermos with Black-Death whiskey and set out on a trudge through the muddy swamps of sludge, doom and drone.” TOKAFI

“The noise of the end of the world and the silence which follows. MONNO is Philip K. Dick transcribed into sound, Norman Spinrad into sonic textures and J. G Ballard in low-end vibrations” CHMAFU

Recorded by Roli Mossiman, former Swans drummer and mastermind producer ( Young Gods, The The, Celtic Frost, New Order, Skinny Puppy,..), during some bleak and cold December days in a Polish farm, and mastered by James Plotkin, CHEVAL OUVERT is probably MONNO’s most accomplished achievement to date as well as their most adventurous and challenging opus.

After sharing the bill with fellow musicians like Knut, Isis, Jesu, Lightning Blot, Melt Banana, Zu, Asva, Todd, Shit & Shine, Marduk or Tony Conrad on the occasion of the 150+ concerts given over the last years, Drummer Marc Fantini, bassist Derek Shirley, Electronic musician & vocalist Gilles Aubry and electrified tenor sax maestro Antoine Chessex felt the need to come back to studio work. Results a powerful though dark and introspective piece of pure sonic radicalism. CHEVAL OUVERT immerses the listener into a brutal typhoon of intense abstraction. A wild ride on a furiously galloping horse that finds itself torn into pieces by human destruction. Monolithic stabs of distorted saxophone, infinite loops of electronic madness and the devastating pairing of a melting low-end bass and mammoth-like drums resulting in a rock solid wall of ancestral evoking frequencies.

The CD comes with a special digipack brilliantly designed by Barcelona based visual artist and allied Marc O’Callaghan.

2013 / 4 tracks / www.idiosyncratics.limitedrun.com /