Short extract about my working method using my voice, without any words or letters; only my voice and of course my mouth are used:
To make an example that I know well, since it is about my work, it is now thirty years that I do not write any scores before assembling an audio-poem. It is just by heart and using only my memory that I conceive the expressions of my body. basically through my mouth with its breathing etc., which become my only solid score. There, I discover a world without limits, from prattles to phonic lacerations. All this happens on, and with the help of, a Revox tape machine, with the addition of sound effects like echoes, changes of speed, larsen effects, until the final editing through sound collages.
In this way, what for someone was nothing but an absurd form of avant-garde with no way out is no more reduced to a mere research of vocal perspectives, but it becomes an experimentation with the voice considered as a new musical instrument with its boundless variations…. The composer Marc Battier understood this very well and, without betraying my first works, he is going to expand them, reaching territories that were unknown to me. Thus my researches with no aprioristic result enriched the voice and the body on one side, and on the other they discovered both voice and music.
With Marc my work reached a new meaning and I am happy about that, as I have abandoned the idea of a poet as messenger. I have used the pompous leaders of the avant-garde movements as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton, and a few others as models beyond their grandiloquent roles, in order to achieve a real form of poetry, a poetry of spaces: written, audio and visual works which I discovered and freely considered as starting points, nothing more and nothing less.
—Henri Chopin
published in Les cahiers de I’ Ircam- Recherche et musique, n. 6, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, 1994)
(translation: Andrea Cernotto)
Contributo di
Eva Brioschi