richard garet l'avenir

Almost a year in the making, the sounds that rather unexpectedly came together to form Richard Garet's l'avenir were originally the pre-prepared audio accompaniment to a performance installation involving live video processsing that took place in November 2006.


New York City-based Richard Garet is a sound/video artist and painter. His work is focused on “the phenomena found and produced in aural and visual time-based media, in nature’s processes, and human beings' relationship with both artificial and natural environments.“ His steadily expanding discography includes his solo CD release Intrinsic Motion (NVO, 2006) and several collaborative works [EA - Balancing Act with Controlled Dynamics: Take Two (Conv, 2008) ; Territorium - with Dale Lloyd, Jos Smolders, and Ubeboet (NVO, 2005)] and compilation appearances [Extract: Portraits of Sound Artists (NVO, 2007)]

Armed with the idea of the "need to make a composition in which the listener would just get lost in it," L'avenir arose from a multiple-layered blend of digitally collected and processed electro-acoustic and synthetic sounds. Richard described for me via email the interesting origins/background of this composition which is quoted in part below:

In November 2006 I did a performance installation at LMAK Project gallery in Chelsea, NYC, with sounds collected during August, September, and October of 2006, that consisted of a sonic field focused on the same pitch but with different timbre or color tone. The piece was presented through 4 devices and each device was in shuffle-mode so all the sounds were coming in and out and the piece was being constructed randomly and always going somewhere. While the aural experience was taking shape I was doing live video processing. When I perform live if I play with both visual and audio I usually pre-prepare one and I interact with the other live and in that case I chose sound to be the pre-prepared material. So after the performance I really liked the way the sound played its role. Initially the sound was supposed to just accompany the video and nothing else but then since I really liked the result I decided to keep working on it and make a composition from that material. These were the sounds that I used in L’avenir. The sources were mainly field recordings with texture and pitchy like characteristics processed until pitch is all you hear.

L’avenir is a composition of three parts: Part I (0 - 4:01) commences with a very distinctive barely audible staccato pitter-patter (which reminds me of the percussive sound of a light rain striking a metal surface). Part I effortlessly transitions into Part II (4:02 - 40:10) which [but for a rather surprising and abrasive interlude (11:59 - 12:49)] is a lengthy stretch of beautiful experiments in tonal flux. It’s the dynamic and unpredictable interplay between various layers of tones in this segment that promote a feeling of being lost. Part III (40:11 - 49:00) brings L’avenir to tenuous conclusion with a divergent segment of fragile minimalism with hazy drones and brittle scratchiness. One of the most notable aspects of L’avenir is the elegant way that it gradually unfolds during the course of its 49-minute duration. A blend of purposeful composition balanced with an equal portion of randomness creates a slightly tense ambiance by juxtaposing the predictable with the unforeseen. Also contributing to this edginess are transitions that are sometimes smooth and barely noticeable and at other times abrupt and startling.

L'avenir shows Richard Garet in one of his best creative moments to date and demonstrates just how paradoxically powerful a work of minimal sound art based on a balanced blend of predictability and randomness can be. A very memorable release I think for Winds Measure Recordings.

reviewed by Larry Johnson in earlabs.org
9-6-2008