Crumbling Land Puce Moment

Crumbling Land, Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel’s second show, melds electronic music, operatic singing and installation art. Inspired by Lapland in Finland, this hybrid object oscillates between art and science, nature and technology, past and present.

For Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel, music isn’t just another buffet item prepared and ready to be served up for all-you-can-eat consumption. For them, sound is a textured raw material to be made into soundscapes, distilled as much as possible in their own unique way, for concert or theater audiences to immerse themselves in. Hybrid form enthusiasts, their second production, Crumbling Land, takes audiences on a visual and sound voyage. LABORATORY In 2005, the two launched Cercueil (Coffin), an electro-pop group that immediately won critical success. But while their music could be characterized as freely eclectic, nevertheless it constrains itself to record industry formats. At the same time they also founded an experimental duo they called Puce Moment. This lab enabled them to spring free of the pop song format, and at the same time, produce music in combination with images, giving their work a more performative dimension. They began to create sound pieces meant to accompany specific visuals, whether in the form of musical films or as alternative sound tracks for movies by the likes of Buster Keaton, Ozu and David Lynch. The name Puce Moment, evoking the idea of creating ephemeral and unique points in time, also references a short film of that title by the mid-twentieth-century American experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. But the film connection ends there, because the duo’s videos have no narrative thread. On the contrary, their immersive installations playfully challenges audiences’ relationship with narration, stories and their smallest component on the screen, images. That’s the case, for example, with Vidéo Dada, a video concert using 1980s music clips. Although anchored in memory, the images are made fresh by the extensive use of slo-mo, zooms, original remixes and of course new sounds. As has been remarked, one of Puce Moment’s defining characteristics is that its productions are ephemeral. Whether they are working with choreographers like Christian Rizzo ( De quoi tenir jusqu’à l'ombre, 2013, Syndrome Ian, 2016, etc.) and Mylène Benoit ( Notre danse, 2014, L’Aveuglement, 2016), or

composing for a film concert, their music is inseparably linked to videos and performing bodies on stage. Each “appearance” is numbered, because they are all conceived for a specific public event. Even when they decided to put out a Puce Moment album in 2013 (minus any projected images or stage performances), Michel and Devos wrote it at one go over a two-week period while holed up in a country house. Yet over the past few years their approach has adopted more reproducible formats. In 2014, they had performers join them to create a movie-concert-performance piece, La Lenteur. Onstage, threemonitorsf or mak in dof installation amid which we see Gaëtan Rusquet surrounded by a musician on each side. While the music aligns with the images, Rusquet’s movements sometimes go with them and at other times go against them in a back-andforth that encourages audience members to think about identity and memory. HYBRID FORMAT Three years after La Lenteur, Crumbling Land explores new horizons. In this show, the music, still comprising electronically generated and altered sounds, this time also includes the voices of two classical singers who play characters in an opera with both mythological and contemporaneous allusions. Using elements suggested by Devos and Michel, the playwright Younes Anzane wrote a short narrative in which an ancient relationship with nature and magic clashes with a contemporary outlook. The story is about a confrontation between two women, one a European Parliament deputy who is complicit with major investors seeking to help themselves to Sami lands, the other a shaman linked to a natural spirit who takes up the defense of her people’s territory. IN REAL TIME Between them, the sun, a symbol of life, continues to shine without worrying too much about mere human activities. A circular black screen four and a half meters in diameter placed center-stage plays the double role of stage set and third character. Not just scenery, Black Sun is a visual and sound installation using video-generating software programmed by the artist Antoine Schmitt. The code interprets data input from the geophysical observatory in Sodankylä, Finnish Lapland, regarding the movements of solar winds that create aurora borealis when the particles enter the Earth’s magnetic field. The recorded electromagnetic intensities are turned into four different sets of numbers that determine the speed of the pixels darting across the screen, their behavior, and their movements toward or away from one another. One piece of data affects the absorption zone of the pixels so that they swell and shrink as a function of the numerical amplitude fluctuation. In addition to modifying the movement of the pixels along their perpetual trajectory toward the center of the circle, each visual parameter also generates sound. As the parameters intersect, they may or may not create melodies and chords. The software is uncontrollable and can seem to freeze if the sun becomes insufficiently active (which hasn’t happened so far). As connoisseurs of the ephemeral and random, Michel and Devos, are enchanted by this organic aspect of the installation so strongly tied to the present and real life. At the same time, the appearance of this Black Sun in every performance also implies continuity, the presence of a real and concrete elsewhere that exists before and after the show. More precisely, this elsewhere is situated three hundred kilometers below the Arctic Circle in the homeland of the Samis, a nomadic people who breed reindeer and habitually migrate across a territory extending through northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Over the centuries this autochthonous people has been assaulted by colonization and seen its borders erased and its customs submitted to Western supremacy. Those remaining on their ancestral lands have to live with mining, forestry and energy interests that eat away at their pasturelands and fence them in. While Puce Moment has no documentary or political ambitions, their piece was inspired by very real problems in a territory marked by the coexistence of shamanic traditions, cutting-edge science and today’s economic conflicts.

Translation, L-S Torgoff