Foris - Raphaël Cendo

Foris is one of the Latin sources of the French word forêt (forest). It refers to a place “outside,” external to civilisation, wild and unknown. At first the composition explores many different techniques of instrumental playing, presented quickly one after another and electronically transformed in real time, which means that the boundaries between the produced sound and its electronic transformations are blurred. After a static central section, where sound space focuses on pure sound produced by the bow on the tailpiece, Foris presents some of the techniques from the opening section again, but transformed and with variations. This is an imagined forest in which everything seems alien: the noises, hollow sounds, explosions, cracking, and the passing-by of weird beings. The score itself also demonstrates a condensation of instrumental events, like a forest of symbols. The textural rhetoric is brought here to the extreme, which forces the instrumentalists to impersonate an actor who is both the master and a geographer of this imagined world. The six-channel sound projection multiplies the auditory–perceptive effect of this peculiar kind of space. I am particularly grateful to Arne Deforce for his commitment and for our joint research, as well as to Max Bruckert for his real-time transformations. 

Raphaël Cendo