La Pièce

In La Pièce (The Room), Carole Rieussec and Jean-Christophe Camps (aka the electro-acoustic duo Kristoff K. Roll) took a different direction. Leaving the studio behind, they devised an elaborate setup allowing them to perform live what most tape music composers do in the studio. Equipped with a sound diffusion system, electronics, and instruments, they are able to perform music on sounding objects, transform sounds in real time, and play back prerecorded material. Xavier Charles' clarinet is included with the setup. As an improviser, his discourse fuels the K. Rolls, but he also has control over his sound by playing in a number of microphones, all with different diffusion settings and altered by different electronics. In La Pièce, listeners thus have Charles' "true" playing (also miked), the alteration and spacialization of his music through the microphones, the possible alteration of his music by the K. Rolls, and the K. Rolls' prepared material and their live electronics. Sound cluttered? On the contrary, it is not. The music breathes, limited to delicate gestures. Charles was already far into the process of stripping down his playing. He focuses on multiphonics and drones, much like what he would do with John Butcher and Axel Dörner for The Contest of Pleasures. The sound poetry of the electro-acousticians balances out the aridity of the clarinet to create something challenging but very much absorbing. The K. Rolls would develop something similar for Le Petit Bruit à Côté du Coeur du Monde with saxophonist Daunik Lazro.