Diane Barbé - Musiques tourbes (forms of minutiae, 2024)
Sound artist, instrument maker and field recorder Diane Barbé is back with her latest album ‘Musiques tourbes’. The title refers to the marshlands where Barbé enjoyed recording their little-known underwater worlds. ‘les marécageuses’ was recorded in the Camargue, the Rhone delta in southern France. The sounds on ‘les enlisées’ come from the rust and heavy industry damaged wetlands around the Kahnsdorfer sewage treatment plant in the Spreewald. The focus of her work is men and its impact on its habitat. Barbé works with both field recordings and her own sounds to imitate biological reality. This is called biomimetics. On the opening track ‘le grand jardin de coupigny’ and the closing track ‘le petit jardin de coupigny’, Barbé mimics the sounds she remembers from her time in the forests of Thailand - which she already explored in detail on ‘A Conference of Critters’, released in 2022 - during a residency at the INA-GRM studios in Paris, on the Coupigny synthesiser. Barbé alludes to a thriving ecosystem that does not exist, but which is created entirely from her memories. This dissonance between real and created sounds is the basis of ‘Musiques tourbes’. She lets us hear what she wants us to hear, while at the same time we feel as if we are standing in these wetlands ourselves. In ‘les hululées’, in collaboration with her ensemble Alien Kin, it is solely humans making the sounds. As a thunderstorm rages through the forest near a crackling wood fire, a few human sound makers blow on ceramic ball flutes, an idea that French composer Marta Carin also already played with. Barbé uses field recordings to capture memories, recreates them and gives them their own interpretation. An extraordinary record that sounds incredibly organic but is only imagined. Who (re)knows the real sounds? Don’t we all remember our own memories?
Released on forms of minutiae,