0065 // Anne Lepère

Anne Lepère, a Brussels-based artist, explores the relationships between various strains of sound design in her work: field recordings, radio drama, and experimental music. Following her time as a co-student at l’IHECS (apply communication degree), Lepère continued to explore the relationship between melody, the voice and the body: in a range of different workshops and residencies. This includes building microphones, "playing sounds of daily life", choreographic programs, and breathing practices... Since then, she has taken part in a wide scope of other sound-related projects, including co-creating Karaonomatopiek, which was performed in 2015 at the Cinéma Galeries in Brussels and Centre Pompidou in Paris with the Revue Papier Machine. She is also increasingly working collaboratively with the Collectif Moniek — a Radio Cabaret project — and with dancers & choreographers with Fondation Royaumont.

We caught up with Lepère to chat about her time on Hailuoto. Using poetic language, Lepère recalls communal life during the residency: “Ten strangers, ten people listening carefully to each other but without any effort, creating a smooth atmosphere where everybody is moving softly. Usually it takes time to be able to act out your own rhythm within a group without leaving your path… here it seems so easy. Ten guys are exploring this astonishing place… a space on the island where you can also hear yourself belonging to a space. Bringing you to the awareness of a resonant inside. Like a skin between voices and world.”

Lepère describes encountering what she identifies as a “mise en abyme process” on the island. The term mise en abyme refers to when an image reproduces a replica of itself into infinity, like the reflection when two mirrors are placed facing each other. It’s also used to describe artistic techniques like a having film-within-a-film, or a dream-within-a-dream. Lepère recalls how the residency—a social microcosm-within-a-microcosm—allowed the international artists to use their collaboration to explore broader issues: “At first you’re arriving on an island, you hear stories of this Hailuoto community. What is happening here is like a micro-life… What position for the strangers, the children, the elderly in this community? How to react to drama? How to move in this space… an island with a very defined territory?”

Overall, the residency sounds like it was a pretty utopian experience. The artists turned the house they were staying in into an instrument, banging on the walls and floors to “play” the architecture itself, giving a new meaning to the term ‘house music.’ The score for their improvisational piece ‘Field Techno’ specifies that you should gather in a forest with ‘multiple analogue, digital, portable noisemaking objects’ in order to ‘listen to the environment, incorporate the non-human’, which sounds like a recipe for a great afternoon. “Fascinated by one sound, focusing on it, you may forget the ensemble,” Lepère comments about the delicate balance required for collaborations such as these. “It can be a fragile composition: outside feeding the inside... inside feeding the outside.”

Lepère’s mix is titled ‘Hailuoto Blue’, and gives us a sonic snapshot of her thought-provoking explorations of the unique sounds of the island. The hour-long curation of the results of the residency’s practical research features tracks produced by other artists who took part, as well as referencing some of their influences. Human and electronic voices reflect and refract the natural music of the environment within which they were recorded, creating the musical equivalent of wondering through an unknown landscape, searching for wildlife.

Tracklist:

Our Field - Sound Map Hailuoto // Hai Art & Various [unreleased] Cellar Song for Five Computer Voices // Maciej Ratajski (Grupa ETC) after Emmett Williams [unknown] The Unavailable Memory Of // John Cage [Mode] The Song of Aurora // Anne Lepère [unreleased] Northern Island // Kritzkom [unreleased] Haiku out of Cage // John Cage (edit. Anne Lepère) [unreleased] Ymir // Andrew Jarvis [unreleased] Triptych Part 1 (extrait) // Eliane Radigue [Important Records] Techno in the Wood // Mushroom Team [unreleased] Aurore B // Anna Otto [unreleased] End Again // Andrew Jarvis [unreleased] Void (2ch) // Jacek Sotomski [unreleased] At The Middle // John Cage [unreleased] 9 // Andrew Jarvis [unreleased] Personal Climate - Choosing Companions // Meredith Monk [ECM New Series] River of Ice // AGF [AGF Producktion] Speech // Kanye West [unreleased] Marcus Coates Anchorhold Song // Hai Art & Various [Hai Art] Sounding Places, Hailuoto // Kamila Staśko-Mazur [unreleased Hailuoto Fieldwerkz // Paweł Paide Dunajko [unreleased] Kaiku Elements // Hai Art & Various [Hai Art] Passage // Laurie Spiegel [Scarlet Records] On The Run // Spaceape [Hyperdub] Strokur // Hildur Guðnadóttir [Touch] Jam In The Forest // Mushroom Team [unreleased]

You can find more from Anne Lepère on her Soundcloud.

• Published
• Jul 20, 2016

• Credits
• Words by Kris_Beaghton