ANALYSIS / THOUGHTS

J’ai été coupé  (1969)

I was cut off

(musique concrète, composed at G.R.M.)

In 1969, I wrote a text on this music. And I said there: “… I do not know why, I called it I was cut or rather I know it but I do not want to say it. That does not have any relationship with the music. . That does not have any relationship with me or that has a relationship with the two perhaps… “etc. Funny, this language of that time. The other day, while listening to this music that I had not heard for a long time, images came to me I will try to tell.

 

In this time, we did not have synthesizers, nor computers, racks, rhythm boxes, all current things in the studios of today. And I remembered how I made certain sounds and that seemed to me a little folk, but all the same rather funny. For example, I had found at the flea market a whole set of measuring instruments having the appearance of tuning forks of various sizes. Suspended with steel springs and rotating while going up and while going down by the fact even from their weight, these tuning forks emitted a twisted and fluctuating sound reflected in the spring in a kind of echo of the prettiest effect. I had invented another instrument: simple nylon wire, but very long, of fifteen meters perhaps. Tended through the studio, with a microphone in contact with one of the ends, I attacked the wire with a wood rod, which produced an odd electronic sound that only the microphone could hear. What was funny and a little tough, is that the wire was so long that to obtain melodies, I had to run several meters, and if the wire had not been as long, there would not have been a sound. I even remember that to tighten it, I had used the handle of the heavy door of the studio, which enabled me, by closing it, to exploit the tension of the wire.

 

And full with other tricks, but that would be too long to explain… All these images do not explain, of course, why I was cut off.