Erwan Keravec asked me to work on a “mixed” system, i.e. blending the sound coming from loudspeakers and that of the bagpipe. Erwan can perfectly show and “share” all the techniques of sound production that he has developed on his instrument. All the composer has to do is to pick what interests him in this lexicon. In other words, the instrumentalist has done at least half of the work, if not more.
For this piece, I wanted to immerse the public in a large virtual bagpipe. I therefore placed the four loudspeakers around the audience, with Erwan in the centre. The four loudspeakers were to symbolise the drones (the three vertical pipes of the bagpipe) while Erwan would only play the chanter (melodic pipe). This would place people at the heart of a kind of hybrid instrument split up in space.
For the electroacoustic part (the loudspeakers), I therefore only used recordings of drones, yet with some alterations (a transposition one octave lower, a transformation by “chapping,” and a process of sound spatialisation that almost modifies the texture of the sound when it moves very fast).
For the instrumental part, I chose to focus on trills, because I think this type of sound production is what makes the harmonic space most glittering, producing beautiful sound artefacts.
By the way, at first I asked Erwan to physically remove the three drones, because I was looking forward to the hilarious sight of the instrument reduced to a hide bag and a kind of beak (the chanter)... in short, an instrument looking like “a hen stuck under one’s arm.” I humbly apologise for that idea. Don’t worry, the bagpipe’s honour is intact and this will never be seen: lacking the weight of the drones, the instrument becomes unbalanced and hard to play. ...The four loudspeakers are placed around the room and Erwan is in the middle of the circle, like the sun (Râ) that makes the trills iridescent.
...The anagram is also easy to find.

Xavier Garcia