This concert version is the development of a short 8'19 version composed in stereo for Transcultures' CD Sonic Spheres, released in July 2023, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Belgian painter/sculptor Pol Bury.
Pol Bury’s kinetic sculptures are fascinating: driven by motors, almost invisibly, using wires or, as if by magic, using magnets, they come to life and invite the viewer to stand still and take the time to discover them. Their slow movements take us into a suspended, almost meditative time-space. Close observation gradually alters the perception of movement and speed. Hypnotic internal rhythms arise; imaginary landscapes emerge, evolve, tip and jostle. Reflections on the polished metal surfaces multiply the points of view like so many dream-like echoes. Is it an illusion of reality or the reality of dreams?
These images and rhythms are echoed in Kinetic reflections: hypnotic repetitions, gravity and lightness, shocks, rolls and flights, mechanics and mystery, themes and variations, transformations, transitions and ruptures all appeal to the listener's imagination.
But Kinetic Reflections also borrows heavily from the collage aesthetic that Pol Bury, a member of CoBrA alongside Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret, explored in numerous works. The vast majority of the sounds come from 10-track recordings of experimental and improvisational sessions involving cello, voice, sensors and interactive digital transformations with the talented cellist Sigrid Vandenbogaerde. They are revisited using musique concrète writing techniques: cut up, edited, mixed and retransformed.
Recordings of surfaces being struck and rubbed, in different acoustic spaces, add inharmonic and noisy counterpoints that remind the complex causality of the hidden mechanisms of kinetic sculptures.
Composed in 2023 at ARTeM studio and premiered at the Autumn Waves Festival, in Brussels, Belgium, on the 6th of October 2023.