PIERRE GÉRARD – Perspective, En Cherchant Le Chevreuil

Trente Oiseaux

For thirty minutes, Pierre Gérard puts the listeners in direct confrontation with the variability of perception, on a merely physical/aural level and in sheer introspective terms. There is no scheme to mentally clutch to feel “secure”; no recourse to categorizations such as “silence” or “minimalism”. Just the asymmetrical concurrence of variously dyed frequencies and acoustic wrinkles that our ears may recognize as familiar derivations (faint suggestions of reed instruments, field recordings), or irretraceable hums that surprise, embrace and occasionally overwhelm, as it happens from the third minute of the fourth chapter, a section that left me aurally unbalanced for a few seconds afterwards. If you start “running after the sounds”, hopelessly trying to anticipate their design amidst the meaninglessness of a life’s moment, disappointment lurks behind the corner. Expecting to understand an “architecture” here is a futile exercise which, needless to say, I had immediately implemented with meagre satisfaction. At one point, the explanation came all of a sudden. These are some of that transitory instance’s fundamental components – “any moment’s music”, if so preferred. Attributing deeper values or implications is dead wrong. The only clear thing is that they exist, ready to vibrate in sympathy within a given microcosm – environmental or corporeal. Mix this record with the whispering airstreams, the cheeping birds and the ricocheting whoosh of a distant town while lying semi-asleep on a couch, and the result is as near to cosmic exactitude as a person might wish. And if the hush of a sealed room is favoured, allow them to adjust your internal resonance rate without fighting.