 I WHO MAKE A PROFESSION OF DUMB THINGS FER1138 (Jean-Philippe Antoine (CD, Firework Edition Records, 2023) FER 1138 I who make a profession of dumb things - a title borrowed from a letter of the 17th c. French painter Nicolas Poussin - originates at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery, in the room which is home to the second series of pictures of the Seven Sacraments executed by Poussin in Rome, between 1644 and 1648. This series of seven pieces attempts to retrace through sound the peculiar visual and aural figure of a place. While visiting this room a few years ago, I became aware of a continuous sound, augmented at times by the faint echo of faraway bells, and at intervals parasited by the dull rumble of trains going by under the gallery, towards or away from Waverley Station, the nearby railroad station. I decided to record it. The recordings I made during several later visits form the basic material of the compositions. They consist of : (a) the continuous sound present in the room; (b) the minor events that occasionally parasitized this continuous modulation: steps and whispered bits of conversation within the room, traffic noises and conversations in the main gallery. From these recordings I shaped seven sound blocks about seven minutes long. Each one takes the place of one of the paintings and is united to the others by the use of the same sound materials. Each sound block’s organizing principle is a journey of the eye from left to right inside each picture, uncovering the structure of the depicted architectures and of the movements of the figures inside them. The graphs thus obtained determine the successive placement of the recorded sound fragments. Each of the pictures on display becomes a score to be interpreted according to the diagrams that the eye discovers or invents on its surface. Listening to the resulting compositions, one hopefully looks at the paintings through one’s ears. Jean-Philippe Antoine. All sounds recorded in Nicolas Poussin’s The Seven Sacraments Room at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland in 2018/2019. Treatments and composition : Paris and Nalliers, France 2019-2022. Mastering : Emil Thomsen at ETmastering. Special thanks to Leif Elggren, Emil Thomsen, Lisa Robertson, Patrick Nardin, Jean-Jacques Palix, Christopher Breward, Thomas A. Clark, Laurie Clark. FER1138 Paris / Stockholm 2023. Earlier releases by Jean-Philippe Antoine |