creation : 04.12.1983 at Bruxelles (Belgium)
musicians: 6 percussionists
duration : 22′
publishing: Ricordi/Salabert
Tempus Ex Machina is essentially a study of time. The heights of skins, woods and metals, schematised to the extreme and quickly spotted by the ear, allow an acute concentration on the temporal structure. It is a blueprint from which the colour is reduced to the bare essentials: only the form emerges, and the slightest error is fatal. The material is almost sublimated into a pure sonic becoming. Thus, the rhythms of the initial sequence are not to be taken as a cell, but rather as a vehicle of time: periodicity, acceleration and deceleration are only three poles between which the discourse shimmers, making its way between the similar and the different, towards the very interior of the sound…
This slow journey from microphone to microphone determines the shape of “Tempus ex machina”, a real time-dilation machine, whose zoom effect lets us gradually perceive the grain of the sound, then the material itself. Thus, the last sounds perceived are only the blows of the bass drum and the wooden drum at the beginning of the score, but dilated to the extreme, allowing us to apprehend the inaudible: transients, partials, beats… the very body of the sound.
After many meanders, we reached the goal of the journey: the other side of the mirror.
Gérard Grisey