Extract : 01.35 mn
original time : 08.47 mn
image & music by eRikm
The image, recorded with a GSM, is a video capture from a car park POS display, retranscribing a software bug.
This 8.24 minutes piece was made out of a five seconds fragment of a pre-existing track, downloaded from the Internet.
Games of speed, fragmentary displacement and time within this cell.
original time : 07.47mn
image by eRikm
Minimalist musical composition
a strange slideshow composed of photographic close-ups taken in an apartment in a total state of chaos plays at regular speed. The flux of images, amongst other snapshots of disorder, shows a CD set of The Legendary Pink Dots, a smashed-in container of yogurt, a packet of miso soup and mismatched sneakers that have never been cleaned.
time : 02.27mn
Digicode by eRikm
image : Sebastien Coupy 2001
Digicode
"In the beginning there was feedback : machines speaking on their own, answering their - supposed - masters with cries of discord. Gradually human beings learnt how to control it, or at least that is what they thought, and the next stage saw the introduction of distortion and artificial sounds, in the form of synthesizers, which human beings also tried to control. (...) Today machines are not content to outdo the human beings who created them, but absorb them, to the extent that man and the machine, having developed an awareness far superior to them, are one." As early as 1975, Lester Bangs predicted how the digital industrial revolution would transform the relationship between musicians and their instruments, and how at a mechanized turning point in sensitivity, a new figure of artistic authority would emerge, namely the operator.
It is precisely this position that Digicode produces, by auscultating in a near surgical way that is totally counter to the heroic and very demonstrative aesthetics of traditional turntablism videos (those of Grandmaster Flash for example), silently, through a magnifying glass, a series of operations, which define the relationship between eRikm and the digital and electronic protheses used. This technical relationship seems to be two-fold, uniting on the one hand the operator with the instruments generating the sounds that he wants to produce and, on other hand, a music-playing exercise of memory (practising improvisation - whether or not it is electronic - proceeding from mnemonics, that is to say being constituted from flaws marking gaps between the mnemonic markers that are the basis of all musical memory) to the memory media used (here the audio cassette, which appears clearly as a prothesis used by the operator’s memory).
Digicode describes the contact of the musician’s fingers with the sensitive surfaces of these digital machines. This contact leads the fingers to invent new means of working, it leads the hand to rethink its handling techniques, up to the instrumentalisation of the smallest muscle. Digicode, by describing this dual relationship where man invents himself through the instrument, writes the story where the body itself becomes an instrument, a thought of the hand manipulating the instrument.
But if there is a central issue that Digicode addresses it is the apparent absence of sound produced by the handling of the ‘musical machines’. From this silence, which is above all the presence of an absence, emerges a phantom sound, which is itself the concern of every spectator/listener, insofar as it becomes the only valid recording surface of what the eRikm practice reveals : ‘the technological extremity’, which contemporary music has reached having multiplied frenetically the techniques of sound meditation, distribution and archiving, a new figure is born, that of the music lover, who can listen permanently to music without knowing how to play it, and for whom silence, over and above everything that it can make ‘happen’ (John Cage), has become an empty surface on which are recorded the tracks of his continuous experience of music and his keen awareness of musical works.
The silence of Digicode offers the possibility of erasure, where the ghosts of our memories persist, a persistence that has disappeared in the decor and reinvents itself unceasingly through the new sensitivities, which can be implemented thanks to this technological musical future.
text : Vincent Normand
translation : Yves Poliart
Time : 05.26mn
Concept : eRikm
Product images are accumulating
Frags is the product of accumulated images (light)
and sound,
a single of film.
This matrix manipulated through a prism (process)
set sail from sails which merely conceal other sails.
video time : 04.44mn
film action version 50.00mn
filmmaker : Gaelle Rouart Etienne Caire
music : eRikm
The handset receiver are black and oozing :
"Where did I thus fall ? "" In an inn where everyone is killed ! "
LEVOX it is the deployment of the panoply of the stereotypes of the history of the cinema.
Its sentimental exhibitions, its fatal demonstrations, the euphoria of a burst of speed, its narrative anorexias, behind closed doors or in great spaces, it is indeed the extensive use of a finished number
of images and sounds.
Who cares under these conditions that the actors are more or less good or that their play is constipated ?
"that at least is cinema ! "
that : power of Babylon, top spin by two barkers "pompier" style whose watchword could be : "one can bring its (food) to eat !"
From sound and visual found footage worked again - frame by frame - (All the images are opticaly printed, processed, tortured in the workshop MTK),we confront these elements in a game of improvisation (we intervene on all the dimensions of the process of projection : masking, overprint, variation of the luminous intensity, the speed of scrolling of the film, the size( of the frame of the image, synchronous sound or not) in a way to develop a suspense, a film archetype if there is, in the form of abstract tension, of story for the eye, with its variations of movements and its apocalyptic skids in hyperscope .
video 1 : time : 1.35mn speed vrs
video 2 : time : 6.20mn slow vrs
image & sound by eRikm
is a work about childhood and mistreatment, a "mise en abyme" in a transformational relation...
time : 04.50mn
image & sound by eRikm
"In every sound bend, I cannot help establishing the link with his facetious video « Depressive Fighter I and II », in which he appears, wearing a boxer’s helmet, producing vocal sounds while struggling with a compressor that sends air in his throat.
He composed two successive versions : the first one, "merely" a sequence shot, could amount to what he can do during " live" shows. The second one, very finely-worked from the reprocessed, filtered, modulated image and sound, would match what he’s just done with all these fragments that take in retrospect a new colour and another consistency."
Jacqueline Caux (Artpress)
image : by eRikm
time : 3.30mn
A series of vertical travelling browses the slices of what we guess to be vinyl sleeves. The loop silently plays the notes of a frenzied remix. Falling, sliding, and bouncing, the image flow writes the chords of a concrete poetry into time. Words flash out off this flow, opened meanings come out and freely connect one to another.