Today we are glad to release Vidro, the new album of french sound artist / composer Nicolas Tourney who surprises and deligthts us once more with a very special project…

Artist’s notes :

The experiences collected in this album are carried out with several devices: a double function generator, two speakers, a glass surface and a contact-mic. By crossing series of infrasound, the inaudible emerges to our conscious perception through the mediation of glass, which gives contours to the vibration and resonance that it induces by its vibratory activity. Vibrant within oneself, transparent, glass brings us back to body experience ; in this it is the ideal material for any “fixed” device (mobile devices having to overcome the difficulty of transporting glass, due to the difficulty of moving large surfaces, or quite simply due to the fragility of the material).

The sound speed wave propagation in glass is extremely fast (5 950 meters per second, compared to 1 520 meters per second in sea water and 330 meters per second in air), which makes glass a material that makes us, in real time and without latency, contemporary with the audible and the inaudible.
The propagation of sound can appear as a moving wave pushing another wave in front – but obviously this is nonsense. If we try to separate cause and effect, the ambient environment transforms and colors the sound it propagates and transports, and the sound in return passes through and transforms the ambient environment or the propagation material.

Helmholtz’s beats are here produced through the interference of two infrasonic frequencies: by interaction the inaudible sources create a third sound human can hear. The resistance-free transparency of glass, crossed by vibration induced by two infra-sounds projected by the breath of two loudspeakers meeting, makes breath a transparent void, crossing the glass and disappearing into the glass.

However, this material is never completely transparent. Propagation material, ambient environment and sounds form an organic and coherent whole. Sound never completely disappears from the initial location from which it is projected/propagated/transported to b location.
Listening to the weightless suspense of vibration which needs the contours of glass to be heard, but which infinitely exceeds any contour as well as any limit, the vibration takes place in the glass, as in an open space; the transparency of the void is induced and revealed by vibration.
By placing the image of glass on the contours that our listening places on the vibratory activity of the infra-sounds projected into the density of the glass, the listener discovers that there is nothing denser, nothing more obscure, nothing more impenetrable than the mystery of glass, that is to say sand which, placed at high temperature, allows the void to be contained, supported and contemplated.

A superficial approach makes glass a cold and dangerous material, showing that glass is only charged with our intentions and projections – with the filter and superimpositions we place on the world and other beings. Glass is both what is on the facade (what is fragile and protects us) and it is the sand under our feet which, in its own movement, is able to move, to transforme, until touching the impossible. Glass allows otherness to be touched, as we are reminded of the iconic poem by Azeri poet Fuzuli in which the author disappears into the sand and then becomes glass to touch the lips of his beloved.

Glass has a matte resonance, which creates slowness screen for sound particles/atoms which are projected against its materiality. Ensuring that our listening enters, penetrates, into the vibration space induced by the breathing of infra-sounds, that is to say the periodicity of the acoustic beat caused by two lines frequencies meeting, two continuous oscillations which, isolated, would remain imperceptible, inaudible, at the limit of crossing this background from which they can appear and emerge in the foreground.

Resonant space is saturated by vibration, and vibration is saturated by resonance (specific to space). When we open the density of the glass by projecting sounds (infrasound or ultrasound), we let the vibration extend in all directions of space. Vibration called “glass” and the other one called “infra-sound projection” are two vibrations which, by interpenetrating, form through their encounter a specific, new and unique spectral form. 

Credits

Nicolas Tourney: One Square Meter of Glass, a Glass Circle whose diameter is One Meter, Aquarian Audio H2a-xlr Contact/Hydro Microphone, Yamaha Speakers DXR15 MKII x2, Double Function Generator.

N.B. : I’ve lost the access to eg0cide’s account on archive.org, so the album is available only on bandcamp for now.