ERIKM - Doubse Hystérie

Photography doesn't just have the power to "freeze" time and enclose space: with the well-known technique of long exposure it's possible to condense them both, obtaining an overall synthesis that is at once unreal and hyperreal, a simulacrum that only imagination and art can shape. It's a device that Jason Shulman has recently applied to the cinematic medium, distilling entire films into single composite frames: impossible pictures, wrapped in a mist from which diaphanous shapes emerge, unrecognizable faces and scenarios without identity, defined in a purely emotional way by their faded hues.

While for many artists altering the course of time is limited to a metaphor – essentially, to the reworking of memory – for those working in experimental music it can be a utopia to approach ever more closely, hypothesizing a sonic phenomenology of it.

This is the level at which sits the work commissioned in 2011 to French composer eRikm (born Erik Malton) by the association "Intermèdes Géographiques", devoted to promoting artistic works rooted in territorial specificity. In this particular case, the founding circumstance is a train journey through the Arc Jurassien, the Franco-Swiss border region, along which each stop becomes an ever-different attempt to invalidate the passing of moments, to fold the image of reality back on itself and crystallize it into an eternalizable instant. Alongside this, the investigation also draws on some of the artist's research into male hysteria, which thus completes the concept through a visual correspondence between the geographic outline of the region (arc-shaped, precisely) and Louise Bourgeois's grotesque sculpture "Arc d'hystérie".

Nine were the original tracks of the project, completed in 2013; six were chosen for the album format that now finds a home in the catalogue of the Polish label Monotype.

It's an expression predominantly in the electronic domain, but one that often originates from acoustic sources: all the pieces, regardless, suggest in a similar way a metaphysical shaping of the soundscapes, desertified scenarios that appear and immediately vanish, prompting us to question the longstanding divide between real and perceived time.

Among the most significant examples is the desolate "Bout De Souffle", where with Cage-like restraint eRikm blows into the pipes of a khên (a mouth organ originally from Laos), whose sound waves are then contracted and expanded in the editing process without in any way altering their tone or clarity.

The meditative "Cirrus" and "Hallali" are in some way mirror images of each other: while the former takes shape as a sudden cloud of saturation swirling around a single note, in the latter a violin and cello guide us through an aseptic, almost inert landscape, barely stirred by imperceptible microtonal oscillations.

But "Argentique" is clearly the boldest step toward suspending a sensory event. Removed from the temporal sequence, as though pressing pause on a digital player, the vibrant toll of a bell shouldn't fade out suddenly but instead spread into a potentially infinite static sound; it's the ultimate objectification of the sonic element, an axiom that in theory seems undesirable but that, put to the empirical test, creates a drone of subtle perfection and takes on an unexpected, sublime emotional quality.

Erasing the forward march of time: a superhuman, supremely ambitious goal, yet one pursued in these exercises in minimalism with full awareness of the boundary it timidly crosses. In the end, the only image capable of describing such mental processes is that of a trail shaped like an apparent movement, as seen through a pupil uprooted from the physical laws of the known universe.

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19/05/2016