Suoni Per Il Popolo Day One: FUJI||||||||||TA, Florence-Delphine Roux, Anju Singh

I was much looking forward to this first night of the festival, which kicked off with an exciting combination of experimental musics: Florence-Delphine Roux, Anju Singh and headliner FUJI||||||||||||TA offered us a range of frequencies from the intangible and imperceptible, the fragile and dense and the sculptural and physical.

At first enigmatic, with an installation of two antennas and a mighty alien setup, Florence-Delphine Roux introduces the night with a concert for headphones–a concept I am very fond of but sadly couldn’t access to a pair. From a stretched listening I could although perceive the live sonic collage from radio transmissions and electromagnetic fields, far away sounds and very close sounds, and sampled ones as well. The interesting part of not having experienced the show as it “should be” is that it made me turn my listening to what others are listening to, without listening to it–both playing with my imagination, my overhearing, and a reflective boredom. It felt as if Roux was a weaver of frequency threads, stitching sounds together across infinite space and matter, time, universes, bodies, our heads and acousmatic types of listening. “Hypnotic”, as I overheard a stranger.

After a brief pause the night followed to the second set of three, multi instrumentalist and Vancouver-based Anju Singh builds up a mass of dissonance and a mixture of neo-classical with a feeling of doom. She plays the LIMINARE hyperorgan (hand-made instrument conceived for Les Vespérales series of events at the church) as an invitation for this performance in particular, the violin, electronics and her voice. Working with layers of pitch variations, loops, violin attacks clawing the organ’s drone, the church is filled with shimmering, density and abrasive clashes of tones and overtones.

The crowd is cheerful, it’s warm inside and becoming chilly outside. We reunite once more for the last set with the experimental and inventive Japan-based FUJI||||||||||TA, who’s on his 5th stop touring the US and Canada.

I’m usually most impressed by minimalist setups–constraints oblige you to push limits, and in Fujita’s case what you see is what you get, and what we see is very refined work with the potentials of objectual elasticity, physics and gesture. The exhaustive gestural exploration with an air compressor and an organ pipe expands the comprehension of a body as an instrument, or an extension of one. Repeating motifs of motions and actions, stretching textures, making an acoustic ancient flute almost sound electronic, deconstructing his own voice: this is a very visceral and astonishing sculptural work of sound in relation to body, and it does make me leave the space non-conforming with the limits of the physical world; solid matter is very elastic. You just need to give it a very special attention, look at it from another angle, or use something other than the eyes to do so.

“Please experience the sound waves in a real physical space”–it’s what the musician asks, and the reason why is made clear during the performative act.

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