For a few years, my aim has been to mark out in my music the courses of our innermost imaginary. In unconscious psychic states, the daily sensorial reality undergoes distortions and, within an extremely unstable and moving space, it progressively gives way to a subjective and intimate reality (the body can suffer distortions, time can be reversible, the same instant can endlessly repeat itself).

I try to express this impalpable life of affects in its utter mobility, by developing sound configurations which are in constant transformation, a continuous disruption of a musical matter which is never definitively constituted and changes drastically our listening landmarks.

These impulses which come through us, this flux which carries along heterogeneous psychic materials derived from different temporal periods of our personal history, form significant constellations, polarities, montages whose architecture is particular, specific to each individual. However, beyond the individual specificities, one always recognizes the abstraction of this other body (imaginary body ?) which exceeds the carnal outlines and which is experienced as an ensemble of places of sensations that dissolve the anatomic cartography and substitute for it zones of intensity.

One of the main lines of my work concerns the writing of a sound body that would reflect the unconscious image of the body, constituted during our life experience and sometimes in conflict with the limits of the real body image. I work on this dimension of the limit and I develop sound objects or instrumental gestures that undergo gradual torsions (dilation/contraction through various rhythmical processes of the matter which constitutes them), timbre variations (insertion of elements that gradually invade the primary timbre). They will combine with other objects and thus create new objects in constant development themselves. Identity becomes uncertain, changes of state occur (the objects can become a texture through temporal stretching or superimposition of layers with different temporalities, the choice of articulating some partials present in a sound spectrum can give birth to a musical gesture which, combined with other gestures, will form the appearance of an object). Some objects are progressively emptied of their harmonic content (the pitches vanish and give way to breath alone, or to noise…), they become transparent, disembodied. Only remains the outline of the object, emptied of its substance, as a dead envelope which one could graft to another object or to another musical situation.

When writing pieces with electronics, the use of a computer allows many treatments (alteration of the identity of the timbres, endless division of the sound, merging of the instrumental and electronic sounds, temporal stretching, modification of the space...) and a possibility of pushing the physical limits of the sound even further. I record noises, instrumental sounds or short sequences already composed and I make them undergo various transformations. I thus constitute a group of distorted objects (as if they were heard through a prism), halos, almost immaterial coils, echoes of the composed acoustic objects. New potentialities appear and contribute to opening a breach revealing another psycho-sensorial field. The listener is within a space with indefinite outlines, the boundaries between the sound objects become blurred, their form becomes elastic or can endlessly recompose as in a kaleidoscope, their source is not clearly perceptible.

Since last year, I have been developing a project on suburban spaces (subway, tunnels, shelters…).

The suburban space (especially the subway) is characterized by its mobility and its ambiguity. The walls, the corridors, the tunnels lead to a reverberation, a reflection of the sound in various directions, a modification or a merging of the timbres and thus disrupt the identification and the location of the sound sources.

The objective is to connect this psychic and bodily experience and the urban world. It is all about giving a form, an architecture to all these sounds that live in an anarchic way under the city in order to find out the poetic strength which pervades them, looking almost alive sometimes. In this huge polymorphic structure, the opposition between objects and living creatures seems to disappear. The sounds appear to be organic or animal, and groans, shouts, breaths and all kinds of sound productions that remind of the animal or human voice can be heard.

And indeed the urban development created by man results from an attempt to extend the human body, to favour or increase its performances. The constructions of all these body extensions that are the objects present in a city (trains, metros, planes, escalators, etc.) compensate for the weaknesses, the deficiencies of the body. After all, these are fantasy productions since they long to deny the reality of the human condition, which is that of the limit.

The musical writing could express a hybrid territory whose boundaries are rather blurred, and which blend together the complexity of the human being’s physiological and psychic functioning (this « desiring machine » as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari named the unconscious in their book « L’Anti-Oedipe ») and the multiplicity of the acoustic configurations of the suburban city (unconscious of the city ?) heard as an urban body, a sort of huge mechanical engineering with its own autonomous life.

Clara Maïda, December 2005

Fluctuatio (in)animi Process		Fluctuatio (in)animi Score