Programme note

Web-wave is the second part of the series Web studies. The idea of this series occurred to me during a stay in New York. Walking all over the town, I was very greatly impressed by the structure of the Brooklyn Bridge and its system of intertwined cables which was strangely reminiscent of a cobweb. This reticular architecture and the term "web" immediately reminded me of the more virtual architecture of any network system, one of which, the Internet (the "World Wide Web"), has gradually invaded our daily life over the last thirty years. On a structural level, nanoscience has taught us that living and non-living matter are made of the same constituents. Any system, whether biological, psychic or technological, results from the articulation between minimal units which keep being bound or unbound, driven by microscopic forces. I have always been fascinated by the paradoxical state in which the mobility of a system is equally conditioned by micro-links and micro-ruptures.

Web-wave is one of the three possible declensions, or actualizations, of the web, one of the virtual potentialities given by a network, where bifurcations, turnarounds, accumulations or sudden breaches, can appear at any point of the path, in an ever mobile and fleeting time. It is interesting to consider oneself, on the individual as well as on the collective level, at the intersection of the interconnections of a diagram. Each micro-movement in one point generates the movement of the surrounding zones. Our hyper connected world is one of the manifestations of this characteristic of a system in which each individual action, however trivial it may appear, can have an unexpected impact and induce an intense upheaval that spreads all over the planet, for better or for worse, with a rapidity which was impossible before the advent of Internet.

In Web-wave, the sound matter is feverish, convulsive. Kaleidoscopic sound objects rearrange the units that compose them in ever changing constellations. The extreme rapidity of the articulations, the jerky succession of the events, and the brutal torsions that traverse the texture, generate a multitude of micro-waves which dismantle the organization and suddenly tear up the musical tissue. The sound density keeps varying, oscillating between clusters of matter and the emergence of tiny and fragile threads which seem to swing in the void. The constant agitation is simultaneously a factor of cohesion and dispersion of the matter.

Upheaval, mutation and hybridization are the three characteristics of this series of which Web-wave, its central axis, is the climax.

The series, and more particularly this second part, recall our troubled time and our confusion in the face of the disappearance of clear markers. The preparation of the piano, and the use of objects which explore all the zones of the instruments, give us the feeling to be in presence of "mutant" instruments, made of strings. An "inter-territory" appears, within which the acoustic identity of the instruments gradually becomes uncertain and converges towards an unprecedented and hybrid sonority, born of the merging of their extended potentialities and the use of electronics.

The three pieces of Web studies are dedicated to all the victims of violence and human madness all over the world.

Clara Maïda, December 2016