Presque rien N° 2 – Ainsi continue la nuit dans ma tête multiple

Almost nothing No. 2 — Thus continues the night in my multiple head

One presque rien is one (i.e. not two) homogeneous and natural nonurban place, having particular acoustic qualities (transparency and depth), where one hears far and near without excess, on the scale of the ear like one says on a human scale, without technology, where nothing is dominating so that the various sound inhabitants have each one their floor and that the superposition of this small world of life never becomes but one almost nothing.

Or the opposite of the sensational.

Then something arrives and takes place.

When I finished composing Presque Rien N° 2, I wrote this:

“Depiction of a landscape of night that the recording engineer tries to encircle with his microphones, but the night surprises the “sound hunter” and penetrates his head. It is then a double description: the interior landscape modifies the external night, composing it, he juxtaposes his own reality (imagination of reality); or can one say, psychoanalysis of his landscape of night.”

This here, I do not know if it’s good to say, or to say it like that.

But what is very peculiar in this story about Presque Rien N° 2, is that after having finished it I did not think any more of making it public, as if this thing were too intimate, as if that concerned only me. This lasted two years. One day, I forced myself to listen to it again, and told myself that I had no reason to lock it up jealously, that it was necessary to give it its freedom, that there was no reason that this secret night does not see the sun.

The premiere of Presque Rien N ° 2 took place in 1979 in the big audience of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and I remember that at a certain moment, people opened their umbrella. I took this for a soft complicity.

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