Sur le fantastique label de Sylvain D**, Ini itu, les disques vinyles sont des lieux de passage entre les structures de la nature et des objets et le projet musical qu’elles peuvent inspirer. Des artistes comme Artificial Memory Trace, Francisco López ou Steve Roden se sont depuis longtemps installés à demeure sur ces postes frontières. Yannick Dauby, quant à lui, est plutôt à l’avant-poste. Son rôle n’est pas des plus faciles. C’est un enregistreur de terrain depuis de nombreuses années, ses field recordings sont réputés et certains musiciens comme Alio Die et Thomas Köner lui ont déjà demandé collaboration. Mais c’est aussi un musicien, et bien souvent ses field recordings ne sont pas livrés bruts, il leur adjoint le geste supplémentaire de la composition. C’est le cas sur l’album 蛙界蒙薰 ( Wā Jiè Méng Xūn ), disque dont les deux longues faces mêlent des enregistrements d’amphibiens pris à Taiwan où il réside, et des sons de synthétiseur modulaire. Prend ainsi forme une épopée qui va crescendo, au cœur de laquelle les nuances de coassements s’égrainent en répondant aux effritements de synthétiseur. Le ballet de ces sons sans qualité harmonique captive par ses mouvements répétés et pourtant insensiblement variés, portant la spatialisation jusqu’à la figuration d’un écosystème hybride. Réponse de l’un à l’autre, la voix des grenouilles et celle du circuit s’enrobent et s’échauffent au point de devenir un seul chant anguleux et moite.
Autre foule grouillante et bavarde, celle des hommes. C’est, selon ses termes, « dans une relation ambiguë de séduction et de rejet » vis-à-vis de la ville de Taipei où il habite que Yannick Dauby a réalisé les trois pièces (chacune répondant à une commande) qui constituent le CD Taî-pak thiaⁿ saⁿ piàn, publié sur son propre label Kalerne. La première, Nous, les défunts, parcourt sur presque dix-neuf minutes un espace où le profane et le sacré se côtoient, dans une célébration de masse qui prend à compte égal les rires les voix l’eau la musique répétitive les feux d’artifice ; avec quoi l’artiste conjugue ses percussions, ses effets, soit son jeu sur le temps. Un enregistrement, puis son appropriation et la composition qu’ils nourrissent ne peuvent qu’altérer le temps comme le tableau ou la photo altèrent l’espace, abolissant les limites qui les encadre, mais se jouant dedans. La fin, crépusculaire, où seuls subsistent les sons de chants de batraciens ou d’insectes, traitent à la façon d’un fondu, de l’abandon à la nuit. La deuxième composition, Taipei 1930, est tout aussi alimentée par le problème du temps, mais d’un point de vue macroscopique. Qu’est-ce qui fait la permanence de la ville, en dépit des tensions entre l’organique et le technologique ? , c’est un peu se poser l’éternelle question de l’ipséité de l’être. Reporté sur la ville, ce problème prend en compte ses pluies, autant que sa circulation. C’est le maître mot sans doute, agrégeant les natures opposées de la chair et du métal, du plastique, mais aussi du temps et de la fuite des hommes vers ces activités qu’ils croient rassurantes. Une fontaine bourdonnante, étouffant les harmoniques dans ses humeurs, guide vers des plateformes qu’on attendait plus peuplées, où résonnent encore des conversations aussi lointaines que les sifflements d’agent de la circulation, une distance comme s’ils surgissaient d’un autre temps. Passé ou présent d’une ville qui reste un espace de vie aussi consacré au singulier comme l’attestent les rires d’enfants et leurs chants, antidotes contre le problème du temps. La pièce de clôture du disque, Ketagalan, propose un autre voyage dans le temps, une exploration de paléoethnographie sonore, à la recherche de traces de la population aborigène de Taiwan, du nom de Ketagalan. Yannick Dauby nous apprend que certains des actuels habitants de l’île sont leurs descendants, dont le sang est depuis longtemps mêlé à celui des Chinois, qui ont également assimilé une partie de leur toponymie. Cette dernière pièce est la plus étrange, tant les sons, loin d’être aussi musicaux que ceux des deux précédentes compositions, n’en sont pas moins musicalisés. Ils agrègent pour un temps, avant de les laisser s’évaporer puis de les ressaisir, des voix – captations d’ondes, des chants - fragments, des vagues, des bourdons, et d’autres sons d’un quotidien aveugle. C’est une pièce fantomatique, la voie nocturne et le voyage dans les limbes temporels s’accordant au projet de la façon la plus juste.

Denis Boyer

2014-12-22

RECOMMENDED

Eccentric, bubbling mindscramble of active compositions set to field recordings of frogs and other watery critters. Dauby treats the recordings with sampler, modular synth, and guitar among other instruments, but in such a way that feels alarmingly alive and alien; it’s easy to tell when he’s manipulating the frog songs, but by their very nature they are so odd, so close to what a synthesizer can generate, and Taylor Deupree’s lathe cutting on this edition is so precise, that even on shitty speakers this record engages with the prospect of a new aural environment, immersive and total. Not all of us get to enjoy nature the way Dauby obviously did in putting these two sides together, but in playing this record you get thrust right into the bizarre, lively systems of pond organizational structures and amphibian communiques all the same. Unbelievably cool record. 250 copies, comes with three (or six) dazzling postcards. (http://www.iniitu.net ) 
(Doug Mosurock)

http://theartofmemory.blogspot.be/2014/01/mmxiii-continued.html

Super Best Friends Club  Super Best Friends Club (Tentacle Entertainment Network) 
Julia Holter  Loud City Song (Domino) 
The Sealed Knot  Live At Cafe Oto (Confront) 
Alasdair Roberts & Robin Robertson  Hirta Songs (Stone Tape) 
Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet  Photographs (Erstwhile) 
Yannick Dauby  Wā Jiè Méng Xūn (Ini Itu) 
Fly Agaric  In Search Of Soma (F-IRE Collective) 
National Bedtime  Jobs For Beasts (Shadazz) 
Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang  The Face Of The Earth (Ideologic Organ) 
Éloïse Decazes & Eric Chenaux  Éloïse Decazes & Eric Chenaux (Okraina)

Jara Tarnovski  (Gurun Gurun, Wabi Experience, IQ+1)

Favorite albums of 2013:

AGF - Kuuntele (AGF Producktion)
Colleen - The Weighing of the Heart (Second Language Music)
Dalglish - Niaiw Ot Vile (PAN)
David Buddin - Canticles For Electronic Music (ugEXPLODE)
Cristian Vogel - Eselsbrücke (Sub Rosa)
Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe (Glassnote)
Karel Goeyvaerts ‎- Pour Que Les Fruits Mûrissent Cet Eté… (Cacophonic)
Lubos Fiser - Morgiana OST (Finders Keepers)
Lucrecia Dalt - Syzygy (HEM)
Mammane Sani - La Musique Électronique Du Niger (Sahel Sounds)
Moskitoo - Mitosis (12k)
Orla Wren - Book Of The Folded Forest (Home Normal)
Strom Noir - Tanec rusaliek (Dronarivm)
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld - Still Smiling (Späcula)
Toshimaru Nakamura, Tomoyoshi Date, Ken Ikeda - Green Heights (Baskaru)
Yannick Dauby - Wa Jie Meng Xun (Ini.Itu)

Dauby pitches his part of the dialogue perfectly. He doesn’t mimic the frogs outright; rather, he empathises with them, co-exists with them – his synthesisers become mysterious figments of the amphibious habitat, embedding themselves amongst the damp foliage as accepted members of the ecological chorus. Yet there’s a deliberate protrusion at play, too – while his electronics possess all of the required moisture and warmth to place them in amongst the haze of rainforest humidity, some of the sounds are distinctly alien enough to remind us that human hands are at work, and that every little bubble of tone or harmonic prickle is the result of a carefully constructed artificial calculation.

As well as highlight Dauby’s talents for amphibious synthesis, the record also points out the organic musicality of nature. The first side ends in climax, as the frog yelps thicken from a sporadic babble into a cloud set to combust; Dauby follows suit, agitating the frogs further through a mid-frequency hum that rattles and quivers in a nervy anticipation of a colossal natural shift (The transition from day into night perhaps? Or the impending commencement of a storm?). On a more molecular level, the record is constantly surging forward on tiny waves of dynamic up-and-down and slow, respiratory-esque fluctuations in tempo. Dauby is constantly embedding himself in the gaps, dropping globules of hum that hit the pond surface and ripple outward in slapback delays, announcing himself during the moments that the frogs cut back and joining them in their proclamations of celebration and danger. Rather than feel like a trivial mash of field recording and improvisation, the album feels like a science experiment; an examination of how frogs communicate and sonically interact, bolstered by a meticulous attempt to simulate, and exist among, their way of living.

Yannick Dauby’s wā jiè méng xūn is a vinyl release on the very fine ini itu label. Two track of 18 minutes each make up the music and in addition to a solid lump of vinyl with a colour printed cover we get comprehensive sleeve notes and two colour photographs.

The music combines the sounds of frogs with the sounds of analogue synthesiser – biotica and abiotica, to borrow from the language of niche construction. My first thoughts when I heard about this album, knowing Dauby’s work as I do, was that he was stepping off the deep end. To generalise unreasonably with my own unreasonable opinions, the analogue synth has its limitations (which I won’t go into here), conventional instruments tend to be playing less instrument and more (but still not much) extended technique with a focus on gesture and concept and new notions of élite specialised musical communities. This leaves the exciting prospect of the infinite variety of ‘stuff’ and ‘things out there’ to make music with, or to forget about music as such and explore emergent properties and fresh paradigms. This was where Dauby seemed to be doing quite well over the last few years.

We are treated though to a surprisingly rich and fresh sound world – froggish glissandi (with insect- and birdy-sounding panoramic sweeps) play alongside arpeggiated synth sounds. It’s an engaging combination, which is what this album is all about, combination, complementarity and of course contrast. An organic/synthetic concept, random biotica and more periodic abiotica – which plays with the old game of source recognition and confusion – the guessing game of what’s what as the music unfolds.

In those passages where the poppy organ and percussive synth patches appear I could imagine a possible music for animation, good sound design, humorous and playful. Overall the sounds and combinations become predictable and recognisable in many ways, more so on one side of the album than another, so there’s no large scale exploration of the synth’s timbral possibilities, more a desire, at best, to create a complex shifting tapestry made from the primary sound sources.

Dauby’s leaning towards rich rather than sparse environments saves the music from descending into lots of gestures with a backdrop of jungly sounds. Overall the tapestry works better with these denser textures – there’s more to listen to and to hold the attention.

On the production side it sounds at times like he might have played his synth and jammed along with the (processed) natural sounds at times to realise a best version.

One side is sparser than the other to begin with, a dialogue which turns into a relaxed multi-way conversation. The music is also ‘pretty’ in places with its rising and falling tones, ambient but (fortunately) not quite new-age. I’m told from the sleeve notes that we’re listening to frogs but I can’t see how you’d know unless you were an expert. So, ignoring the facts and following my imagination, such recordings of bird-, frog- and insect-like sounds, even processed, can often afford a sense of place and indeed space. I had a reminder of this recently listening to some of Geoff Sample’s incredible wildlife recordings from Alemoor Loch in Southern Scotland. Take away the living creatures and you have no place, no space even, just a lot of gristly static sounds with traffic in the distance. Here the frog sounds are dislocated from place and space, used as raw material, but Dauby is musically clever enough to leave enough of a trace of the environment which adds a touch of magic to his work.

However there is so much more to all this business of working with environmental sound and David Dunn for example has made some interesting inroads, at least conceptually, into new ways of considering our interaction with sounds from natural environments. In an article entitled Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred, (available online:http://www.davidddunn.com/~david/writings/terrnova.pdf) Dunn speaks of how he wishes to ‘deconstruct the materials and attributes of music as a means to explore and demonstrate the emergent intelligence of non-human living systems’.

He distances his own approach from the practice of John Cage ‘who wanted to decontextualize sounds so as to “allow them to be themselves,”

He continues: ‘I have focused upon the recontextualization of the sounds of nature as evidence of purposeful minded systems: the song of a bird is not just grist for compositional manipulation, it is a code of signification not only between members of that particular species but also for the extended fabric of mind that forms the biohabitat within which that species resides. While Cage wanted to abstract these sounds, I’m interested in regarding these as conscious living systems with which I’m interacting. These sounds are the evidence of sentient beings and complex-minded systems. Many of my compositions have consisted of establishing an interactive process through which a collaborative dialogue emerges that is inclusive of this larger pattern of mind.

The resulting projects are not only descriptive of their environmental context but generate a linguistic structure intrinsic to the observer/observed relationship. They are an expression of the composite mind immanent in a particular connective instance. I refer to much of my work as “environmental language” so as to distinguish it from the more general term “environmental music.” The issue is not, how can one bring out latent musical qualities in nature but rather, what is necessary to stipulate an intrinsic sonic structure emergent from a specific interaction with non-human systems?’

In keeping with his own self-described approach, Yannick Dauby merges two markedly contrasting worlds in his work: field recordings-based nature sounds focusing on Taiwan's amphibian fauna coupled with modular synthesis performed at home and in private. Wa Jie Meng Xun thus offers an ideal illustration of Dauby's style and furthermore comes naturally to a sound artist born in the south of France but who since 2007 has lived and worked in Taiwan. The incorporation of manipulated amphibian sounds (i.e., frogs) into electro-acoustic environments makes for an arresting listening experience, especially when what is presented at times suggest some natural-synthetic communion between living organisms and machines.

The amphibian sounds provide Dauby with an endlessly rich and varied resource with which to work, although it should also be noted that it's sometimes hard to differentiate between the deep-throated croaks and whirrs of the creatures and the sounds generated by Dauby's modular synthesizers and electronic gear—which might, after all, be the point he's most hoping to make. That such an indeterminacy arises doesn't prove unsatisfying, either, as the listener simply surrenders to the stimulation provided by an endlessly mutating stream of exotica. With Dauby presenting the material in two eighteen-minute sides rather than as indexed tracks, the material appears as a sequential flow of vignettes, most of them extremely dense in the number of layers of amphibian sounds that are in play at any given moment. In the multi-dimensional mix, synthesizer and animal sounds often function as lead voices while a thick mass burbles and chirps in the background.

While not music in the conventional sense, Wa Jie Meng Xun assumes a quasi-musical form at times, too, such that at one point on the second side the material even starts to resemble the playing of a gamelan ensemble. To his credit, Dauby strikes an effective balance on the recording (each of whose 250 copies includes three postcards showing photos taken by Dauby in Taiwan) between improvisation and structure and between playfulness and seriousness of purpose.

For around five years French musician Yannick Dauby has been living in Taiwan, where one of his projects involves audio-documenting the local frogs. So far, his self-released album Songs Of The Frogs Of Taiwan Vol.1 has covered half of the domain's 32 species. But this splendid LP on Belgian label ini.itu has Dauby performing along with the frogs - many species, and many modular synths. The title is a reworking of a line from a Chinese sutra, etched in English around the vinyl's centre: "The incense is burning in the brasero [censer]; the realm of the amphibians receives its fragrance." the record's ecological and spiritual credentials are weighty indeed - yet it's a rich and humorous listen. All this parping and bubbling conjures up miniature motorbikes racing along a Mario Kart rainbow, or maybe the vivid colors of a Pixar movie like Monster Inc.
These days field recording is an increasingly crowded, well, field. As a rule I prefer my field recordings straight and unprocessed. Earlier this year, I enjoyed the cool presentation of the enigmatically titled v-p v-f is v-n compilation on Winds Measure: shuffling crabs, glaciers and trains, beautifully recorded and allowed to speak for themselves. But Dauby's modular synths hit the jackpot, because they sound enough like frogs to blend in, and a magical bifocal environment is created: half unprocessed frog choirs, half hectic electricity.

フィールド・レコーディングといえばこの人の作品は要注目。
台湾在住なのでしばしば亜熱帯の音素材を使い、ここでも
題名通りカエルの声を使っているが、直球のフィールド録音
ではない。一部にシンセで即興的に演奏した音をごくさりげ
なくミックスした、いわば広義のコンクレート作品である。とも
すればあからさまなアンビエント作品になってしまいがちなと
ころを、抜群のセンスでコントロールしているのはさすが。限定250。
＜試聴＞ 

Born in France, but living in Taiwan at the moment. Dauby dabbles with electroacoustic compositions, soundscape collages, and musique concrete. This release is focused on the twitching sounds of the night. Crickets, bugs, frogs, everything that you’d imagine living in a bayou. The purring and chirping of amphibians is bubbled along with improvisations on the modular synthesizer. Field recordings taken from around Taiwan. Mostly relaxing, except for the occasional barking creature and low synth jumble. Side A does build up to some intensity near the end. Dauby regularly connects with naturalists and often provides the sounds needed for their exhibitions and documentaries.

YANNICK DAUBY - WA JIE MENG XUN (LP by Ini.Itu)
More music by Yannick Dauby, of whom we reviewed a work last week. That one seemed to be about real chimes, but here it's something else, entirely. Dauby originates from France, but moved to Taiwan in 2007, where he still lives and works. Much of what he does deals with field recordings, both from the country side as well as from urban situations. He presents these along electronic sounds, from an array of devices, analogue and digital. On this new album he plays around with modular synthesizers and field recordings, more especially, field recordings of frogs. Maybe it's a bit odd to do so, (as he says himself), but in these thirty-six minutes I must say it works rather well. The frog sounds work wonderfully well with the electronic sounds. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's what here, and what seems a frog might be a synth, and vice versa of course; sometimes it's all plain and clear. The music bounces around like frogs do, it's all over the place, and makes this rather a ju
mpy, joyful record. You would almost rush out to a pond yourself and experience the sounds yourself. (There is no such pond easily around here however, and it's raining - although that would create a nice effect too). Maybe I like to be at home anyway? This record is a great one. It has the playfulness of an improvised music record, but upon closer inspection the more rigid organization of a seriously composed record, and none of that takes anything away from the pleasure of hearing this. Excellent record, maybe the best I heard from Dauby so far. 

There are a lot of artists who divide opinions in our office, and one of them is Yannick Dauby. Dauby is a Frenchman who constructs passages of music around field recordings. He has released an album documenting the Atayal tribe in Taoshan, another of Taipei city and its surroundings, and here’s his second album of frogs recorded in Taiwan.

Well, it’s not just frogs. On this record, Dauby delicately interweaves his amphibian recordings with improvisations on modular synthesiser, blurring the lines between the synthetic tones and the relentless parping and chirruping of the amphibious army which populates the duration of the LP. It’s quite otherworldly and in places quite intense, but other times it’s burblingly therapeutic and strangely captivating. Collectors of unusual sounds will find a few they’ve probably not encountered before here, but if field recording heavy ambience isn’t your bag then you may find it a little hard work. It’s an edition of 250 and comes with three very charming froggy postcards.

On connait déjà le travail de Yannick Dauby, musicien français éxilé à Taïwan. Phonographiste et sculpteur de fréquences, il écoute l'environnement sonore et partage avec nous cette écoute grâce à ses microphones. Pour ce nouveau disque, il s'agit de confronter sa pratique du synthétiseur modulaire avec des chants de batraciens enregistrés à Taïwan. Nombreux sont les musiciens qui ont ouvert leurs oreilles sur ces chants et ceux de Taïwan sont encore bien particuliers. Dans ce mixage calme et serein, la question se pose de savoir qui joue avec qui, qui imite qui ? Une belle aventure !