Saw phonography

In addition to this, you will need to know more about it.

The mole has the ability to grasp an earthquake of a few hertz. The elephant, that of listening to the clouds. As demonstrated by an experiment conducted by the British television channel BBC Earth, pachyderms are indeed able to perceive the infrasound generated by the movement of cumulus clouds in the atmosphere, and it is suspected, to determine thus their orientation when they migrate in search of a water point. As for the human species, its auditory field is confined to frequencies between 20 Hz for the most severe and 20,000 Hz for the most acute. A relatively small area compared to that allocated to other mammals. However, this sound range is teeming with acoustic vibrations of different kinds. There are the almost imperceptible hums, the light and distant noises, the muffled and the deaf, the crystalline, the felted and the metallic, the familiar, the unusual or the monotonous, the dull, the continuous, the soothing and the intoxicating. On the other hand, there are the sounds that explode and backfire with their deafening and infernal cohorts in turn barbaric, trying, painful, thunderous or fatal. Guillaume Laidain is interested in those that we do not hear or that we do not want to hear. In this last category rushes the specter of modern life: noise pollution.

In addition to this, you need to know more about it.

Invited by Zébra3 as part of the “Artist residences in companies” program *, the sound visual artist immersed himself in the daily life of Pierres de Frontenac located in Entre-deux-Mers. For three months, from January to March 2020, this native of Soyaux in Charente worked alongside the employees of the family business specializing since 1965 in the extraction and processing of this stone of which many monuments and Bordeaux facades are made: the Bordeaux stone, its real name is Asterias limestone.

In addition to this, you need to know more about it.

In the lunar setting of this quarry based 45 km from Bordeaux, blocks of rock weighing several tons are extracted and then shaped in a mechanical ballet involving machines of all kinds. Among them, there is one whose screaming necessity undoubtedly surpasses all the others: the circular saw. Intrusive and abrasive, its unbearable din forced the workers to equip themselves with earplugs topped with earmuffs. Hearing protection which installs them in another dimension… Which intrigues and fascinates the graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Grenoble and the Bordeaux Conservatory in electroacoustics.

In addition to this, you need to know more about it.

"Any noise listened to for a long time becomes a voice", said Victor Hugo. And with it, the idea that a sound perceived for a long time, during a repeated, extended, lasting or even permanent space-time entails with it a form of quasi-ontological mutation: that of the distant to the familiar, that of the inert. alive. From the sounds produced by the various circular saws present on the Frontenac site, Guillaume Laidain imagined a sound piece guided by the initial intention of reversing the primitive grasp of a material that the neophyte will gladly classify in the hated categories of stridulant. and deafening. Ungrateful, these sounds, which are as omnipotent as they are extreme, are nonetheless rich in protean ranges which vary according to the specific characteristics of each cutting tool but also according to the manipulations exerted on the stone. A yellow, porous, crumbly and organic stone studded with all kinds of fossils. Oysters, corals, bones of starfish ... like so many buried vestiges of time, of which Guillaume Laidain endeavors to poetically restore the cuts suffered in a sound piece where monotony gives way to the auditory journeys of a saw exempt from its most sharp strata. The extension of this score materializes in the form of an installation which brings together a constellation of speakers embedded in as many pieces of cut rock, similar to beacons from which the wandering listener wanders and composes his own polyphonic adventure.

In addition to this, you need to know more about it.

Anna Maisonneuve

* Program launched in 2014 by the Ministry of Culture and supported by the Regional Directorates of Cultural Affairs (Drac)