LP – Cellule 75

Michel Serres’ The Parasite is a philosophical text from 1980, made up of “asymmetries, multiple grafts and mutually incompatible discursive registers” that inspired Marc Richter, a sound artist who lives and works in Hamburg. Here, for the first time. Richter focuses on a particularly abstract and spatial project, composed of two multi-channel works recorded respectively at the Ina GRM Studio in Paris and in the ZKM Institute in Karlsruhe. Richter uses vocal synthesis in Diode, Triode, manipulating the sounds used, so as to make them unrecognisable through repeated distortions, which are then combined with traditional sounds obtained from strings, reeds and percussion. If, in the past, Richter’s stylistic code was full of a multitude of small sound events that he meticulously fit together, the time has come for more structural interventions, of a cybernetic and visionary matrix. Above all, it is the synthetic and elaborate human choirs that lend the setting a posthuman, lunar and disturbing appeal. The flow of the two scores is that of a sensitive body, a threshold, an improbable place of passage, mediation and exchange. If we are looking for some kind of hope, now, it’s a sobbing, cracked and choked breath, urging us to prevail. Even the vocal fragments seem to be strange warning messages, perhaps stock market values, sequences of random numbers and neurotic stammers: a linguistic mixture. Sometimes piano chords or other acoustic emissions arrive to take us back to the material world. But “the parasite” is a differential operator of change, the noise that disrupts the system from within, just as Richter disrupts the acoustic tradition.

 

Marc Richter – Diode, Triode