Valets

In his work Valet Noir: vers une écologie du récit, Jean-Christophe Cavallin encounters by chance a stray dog near the mill where he had secluded himself to think and write the book in question—more precisely, to explore the primacy of storytelling and the spoken word as passed down by storytellers, observing the shift from the real to the fictional in the imagination. This small dog, an incongruous presence, might it not be a figment of his imagination, especially as its chewing evokes in the author the memory of his grandmother’s masticatory sounds?
This intertwining of theoretical narrative and intimate experience—the latter mirroring the former—against the backdrop of the terrestrial natural world’s decline, nourished my own reflections for many months. I found myself questioning the most compelling ways to materialize an invisible, intimate presence through a cohesive musical form. It was also essential for me to draw from a world so vital to me, accompanying me daily: the vegetal world, or rather its absence and its urban strategies of display—“Parks, gardens, shared vegetable plots, trees, green façades [as] so many possibilities for experiences of renewal”—decontextualized simulacra born of the city’s concatenation. I thus chose to employ an electronic device blending organic, analog tools with an imperceptible, subterranean human presence. As a guitarist, my familiarity with amplifiers, effects pedals, and the like also lies at the root of this piece’s project, as do the tales of guitar heroes that shaped my adolescence.
Valets is therefore a piece for eight solo guitar/bass amplifiers, activated by pre-recorded electronics, and an ensemble of twenty musicians: eight “valets,” typically at the mercy of humans, now autonomous, gradually revealing a sonic material primarily composed of motifs and sounds inherited from metal, free jazz, or noise—gestures that are visually invisible at their origin.
Unlike a high-fidelity setup, the diffusion itself is “colorful” and interactive, thanks to the internal characteristics of the amplifiers. These behemoths surround the ensemble, with twenty musicians serving as their ecosystem, challenging both the eye and the ear by playing on the invisibility of sound generation: despite the mechanical transcription, the uniqueness of each amplifier exposes it as a singular protagonist, a soloist whose humanity asserts itself over the course of the piece, while the humans are reduced to the role of accompanists to the machine that dictates the narrative’s course.
The listener can thus discover how the musicians interact in time and space with this intangible matter, this deus ex machina, moving from an initial stammering—an amplified narrative within an archaic yet welcoming environment—to a dystopian tale where storytelling persists, struggles, and proliferates in this inhospitable world.