les écoutis le caire (2009)


This audio piece is based on field recordings collected in Cairo during a six weeks residency at the Pro Helvetia liaison office in february/march 2007.

Several locations have been chosen for their resonant properties and mostly silent contexts. Beside their particular acoustic qualities, these spaces were equally interesting as points of listening to the busy Cairo streets that were always to be heard indirectly.

This principle of indirect listening has been used throughout the piece in order to catch the attention of the listener, this beeing a preminilary condition for an intense musical experience.

Considering this, the foreground of the piece has been treated as an abstract layer made out of the sounds of empty spaces crossfading into eachothers. The background carries informations about the very rich soundscape of Cairo - heavy traffic noises, traditional markets, street vendors, colorfull music, prayer’s calls, mobile phones, voices and so on – but the identification of these sources remains ambiguous.

In a constant process of switching between several listening modes – figurative or contemplative – the listener finds himself/herself confronted with a work which is not clearly musical, nor non-musical and hence must make a decision about how to apprehend it.

More generally, les écoutis le caire raises questions about space representation and the cultural signification of sound.

les écoutis le caire has been premiered on the 18^th of september 2009 on Deutschland Radio.

A CD version has been published in march 2010 on Grün Rekorder, together with a text by Stéphane Montavon.

Listen to some excerpts of this CD Here