Creation : 16 May 2009, Festival Les Musiques, Marseille (France)
Musicians : clarinette, basson, violoncelle, trois percussions et électronique
Comissioner : Ministère de la Culture, GMEM
Shel(l)ter is a cycle of four pieces that refers to a very specific space, one of Berlin’s atomic shelters. The repetition of the letter “l” condenses the words “shell” and “shelter”, which evoke the attempt to protect the body from aggression. But “shell” also means a shell, and the double polarisation of the word underlines the absurdity, constant in human beings, of constructing both objects of destruction and objects that would protect against that destruction. Placed inside parentheses, this repeated “l” indicates both a stop and the bifurcation or transformation of a repeated element, a rupture, a mutation of the structure of a given material or situation, as well as a separation or confinement, the self-destructive perverse effect that any protection is also likely to induce when it leads to isolation. In Shel(lter, we could speak of “nanomusic” (a reference to the nanosciences that observe and manipulate objects on an atomic scale), insofar as this mobility and this transformation of the properties of the musical fabric are the result of microprocesses that act on sound particles, generating variations in mass, shape and path, but also resistance or persistence. The atomic thus reminds us that everything is particle, everything is atom, the sound field being only one of the possibilities of the infinite field of matter. In this first piece of the cycle, the subtitle später… ( ) … Winter – which in German means “later … ( ) … Winter” refers to the hypotheses of a nuclear winter following the explosion of several bombs. According to the models proposed by scientists, in such a situation, large quantities of smoke and ash, generated by the combustion of plastics and petroleum-based fuels, would be injected into the earth’s atmosphere and produce such a climatic state. The formation of a layer of particles would significantly reduce solar radiation. Thick black clouds would then form and absorb light, inducing extremely cold weather conditions. The piece revolves around this dialectic between, on the one hand, an extreme disturbance of musical matter, phenomena that mimic nuclear fusion, fission or chain reaction, and on the other hand – mainly with electronics – an elastic coagulation of sound masses that slide like lava flows, and can evoke the unstable layers described by geology, or a ground collapse, as well as a state of psychic trauma experienced as a kind of temporal suspension, a freezing of mental faculties or the impression of an inner capsizing. Nuclear fission is the phenomenon in which a large atomic nucleus disintegrates into several smaller fragments, with a neutron emission that releases a very high level of energy. In the chain reaction, each neutron emitted during the fission of an atomic nucleus can in turn cause the fission of another nucleus, and this process can then multiply. An A-bomb is designed to deliberately set off a chain reaction, so the music is “atomic”. It is the result of an assembly of infinitely small particles that form compact objects that, as energy accumulates, explode in the sound space and disseminate their components. It is also “genetic”. The upheavals induced in matter are reminiscent of those that can be described on a chromosomal level, with the possibility of replication errors, breaks, permutations of microelements. All these minute modifications then generate deformations and new (or mutant) forms.
Clara Maïda, November 2010