Électrorythmes danse

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, Musique électroacoustique et cinéma, Archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, 2012.

Taking up the main theme of Peter Foldès’s films, the idea of the transformation of the iconic image of woman, the film scores that Bernard Parmegiani composes for Foldès are each time an occasion to cross electroacoustic music with other genres, notably the popular music of the period: pop music in Je tu elles (1967), which materialises in his catalogue as Pop Eclectic (1968), Jazz in ElectroRythmes (1966), Jazzex composed the same year,

After cutting, chopping up, assembling and then editing the various fragments of the improvisation of a jazz trio, Bernard Parmegiani imagined an arch form, figured by the use of a powerful frequency-band filter of the Krohn-Hite make.

At the beginning and at the end of the piece, the jazz trio seems to emerge from, and disappear totally into, the depths of a low-frequency filtering. The keystone of this symmetrical form is revealed gradually and corresponds briefly to the moment when the filter no longer has any effect and lets the whole bandwidth of the jazz trio be heard, before tipping slowly once more towards the low register.

The articulations in the editing of the music are punctuated by interventions of concrete elements, the rubbing of metal and other electronic textures.

This information notice was co-produced with INA/GRM for the creation of the multimedia fresco – Artsonores – L’aventure électroacoustique, in the category Films produced by the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF from 1950 to 1975.