Entre Vifs offers us with “Ontology” a selection of extracts from their best recent sessions. Each of these excerpts has been cautiously positioned by the authors, so that they appear like bruitist pieces, composed with care, even though all of these pieces are played live. Each time, it is a symphony of noises extremely varied in intensity and frequency where one can distinguish, with precision, the sound detached from its original source. Entre Vifs’ noise generators are delicate and relatively small in size, but the sounds they produce through mechanical means are captured by electric guitar pickups and piezoelectric cells, then sent to a battery of amplifiers and homemade effect processors. The sound passages suddenly arise from very orderly silences. The sound is extremely massive, however it is not only a question of volume but a stereophonic depth effect where sonic masses seem to thicken and change continuously. Furthermore, we sometimes hear a residual soundwave that could be due to the complexity of the material and the large number of “noisers”, in particular at the beginning of some pieces, as if the duo began its sessions in unison, that is, exactly at the same time. Entre Vifs takes us directly from the microcosm of the Entre Vifs - ONTOLOGIE air movement to the macrocosm of their organic bruitism, which is not unrelated to the title of this album. Faced with the materiality of the sound of these extracts where each piece is rendered with great sonic precision and where the sound of the “noisers” is dotted with plays in unison as if the machines began to shout at the same time, we cannot help but think of Arseny Avraamov’s “Symphony of Factory Sirens”, which in 1922 practiced the art of noises in its mechanical version using among other things the foghorns of the whole Caspian Fleet. The fact is that we cannot define the sensations of power produced by these extracts in terms pleasing to music-loving people. They are soundscapes entangled as if we had traveled quickly from the fury of the volcano to the most industrious human concentration through an avalanche at high altitude. The power of chaos is nothing more natural than what nature can produce when it speaks to us. However, it is important to understand that the administration of chaos by Entre Vifs doesn’t care to fuss over decorative effects, and that rather than tickling politely or subversively our eardrums, EV opens the doors of raw material with the joy of children who blow their balloon near our sleeping ears. With this album, we can physic ally touch the creative process of Entre Vifs, from the sometimes absurd idea of building an instrument from objects not intended to produce sounds, on to the labor of practicing this instrument long enough to improve it, finally to the joy of freeing the action with these tools at first glance recalcitrant. From the smallest of emergence, that is to say the random and stubborn idea that we discover by pure sequence of circumstances, Entre Vifs makes us hear the most massive by pushing the doors of the materiality of chaos-noise, screened through the creative human industry in its most persistent form.
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