7 vallées

Close to the aesthetics of sound design, 7 Vallées is a piece conceived as an attempt to evoke to evoke landscapes held in memory, whether emotional or invented.
It is inspired by a region of northern France that cradled my childhood, with its narrow valleys, woods and rivers, and by François Jullien’s Vivre de paysage ou l’impensé de la raison.
My aim here is to create blocks of time that are very economical in terms of material, presented with different lighting and in which certain plastic properties are placed in tension with one another (verticality/horizontality, harmonic layers/concrete sounds, fixity/movement).
The discrepancies resulting from these tensions, and the listening situations composed
at once minimalist and fragile, echo our own interiority and relationship with the world.
This internalized distancing takes shape in the elaboration of chamber electronics
which combines a simple stereophonic diffusion on stage with a light amplification of the instruments to reveal timbres of very low acoustic intensity.

Aurélien Dumont