Murail, Tristan – Liber Fulguralis

Description

Liber fulguralis is a “joint creation” with musical and visual components developed simultaneously by Tristan Murail and Hervé Bailly-Basin.
Inspired by the ancient oracle’s art of interpreting lightning, this nearly half hour work elaborates on the ramifications of a single strike of lighting. Following a prologue with an unusual form – a single minute of almost imperceptible sparkling sound and light – and later recapitulated, to be “interpreted” in innumerable ways… Ancient pretensions of divining give way to a poetic exegesis of one of nature’s most fascinating phenomenon. Tristan Murail thus continues work begun with sounds of the ocean (Le partage des eaux) and of rain (Le lac): using recent techniques of spectral analysis, to dissect concrete sounds into elementary components, and then reinserting this material and its multiple transmutations into the musical space-time. In Liber fulguralis the sound’s motion combines with that of the image. Hervé Bailly-Basin further develops procedures found in his preceding collaborations with Murail: shots taken at different speeds and scales are excerpted from fragments whose re-composition with completely synthesized elements brings forth a “vision” of an entirely different order, at the limits of perception, of the imagination and of symbolism.

Video:
This work uses electronics sounds (obligatory) and images (optional) which are projected behind the musicians.