Chatoyance (an optical reflectance effect seen in certain gemstones), comes from the French “œil de chat”, meaning “cat’s eye”. “Chatoyancy” can arise from the fibrous structure of a material.
Listeners familiar with my work will not find it difficult to connect the sound-world of Chatoyance 1 to earlier works I have made in the voltage control studio of the Institute of Sonology, such as the Depths of Field series and Geoglyphs. However, there are significant differences in the gestures and the patching techniques from which these pieces were derived. I believe I now have managed to incorporate rhetorical qualities in the automated generation of the sound structures, whereas in the earlier voltage control pieces, such qualities were based more on the succession and superposition of different and separately generated sound structures.
In Chatoyance 2, further transformations of the analogue sound material are combined with processed microphone recordings.
Chatoyance 2 was commissioned by the Groupe de Recherche Musicales and premiered in January 2014 at the Théâtre Saint-Germain in Paris as part of their Multiphonies concert series .
Chatoyance 1
year: 2012
duration: 10:00
tracks: 8
Chatoyance 2
year: 2013–2014
duration: 14:20
tracks: 8
Chatoyance 2 is available on the 9 Trajectories CD-box (INA-GRM G6050/59).