Another “audio puzzle” from French composer Yvan Etienne. His Les Météores du Coeur (APOSIOPÈSE APO 18) is decorated with a beautiful cover painting by Chisato Ishiyama, the reclusive Japanese-born painter who lives in Brussels; dead flowers are the first thing we see, prompting associations with Rimbaud, everyone’s favourite decadent poet who was clasped to the surrealist bosom, but the digipak unfolds to reveal a wineglass, a dice, a carving knife and a rock posed lovingly on blue velvet, with a nifty map of the stars in the background, thus widening the references to include Magritte and Joseph Cornell.
I feel I’m on safer ground with this sumptuous visual statement than I am with the inscrutable sounds created here by Yvan Etienne, seemingly created with a mix of electronics, analogue synth, and field recordings, although he did also recruit a five-piece choir of vocalists. Our French genius likes to be very sparing with his sounds, spreading them thinly like a layer of choice butter across the cosmic baguette. Each cryptic utterance only deepens the mystery. It’s not especially “minimal”, but the intentions of the composer are far from transparent. His penchant for self-concealment even extends to the printing of the titles and credits, rendered in a tiny lower-case font size on a black background. When he heard him last on the intriguing record Twist, one guiding precept was that the listener ought to be equipped with a very good memory and thus, perhaps, perceive more clearly the long game that Yvan Etienne is working out on his grand canvas.
Writing online, fellow sound artist Stefan Roigk is able to make out far more detail than I can on today’s spin, and even give names to many of the sound sources; he does remind us that Les Météores du Coeur contains some powerful contrasts, and not simply of quiet versus loud volumes; the bleak, hollow moments are compensated by stretches of great density, the chill of the silent grave is balanced by the squeals of the young child. At one level, Etienne might not be asking to do much more than appreciate these varied audio textures for what they are, without any expectation that they amount to music, or story-telling. (25/06/2025)