Darmstadt in the jungle. A special soundscape radio-edit by Yannick Dauby.
Yannick Dauby is an artist who was born in the South of France and who since 2007 lives and works in Taiwan. He studied musique concrete in France and began working with field recordings in 1998, capturing fragments of environments, urban situations, animal signals and unusual acoustic phenomena.
On stage, he improvises with an assemblage of found objects, recorded sounds, electro-acoustic devices, modular synthesizers and computers. Fascinated by ethnology and natural sciences, he often wanders into these domains in collaboration with naturalists (nature sound recording, acoustic surveys) or for Taiwanese community-based projects in Hakka and aborigines villages.
He has collaborated with musicians such as Hitoshi Kojo, Michael Northam, Alio Die and the visual artist and poet Wan-Shuen Tsai. His works could be filed next to those of Eric La Casa, Emmanuel Holterbach and Francisco López.
The project for this LP started after Yannick Dauby posted a few videos showcasing his latest live setup, mangling field recordings of frogs and modular synthesizer improvisations, quickly arising our interest. In the following months, the results of several improvisation sessions were used as compositional material for a work that now interweaves natural and synthetic lines.
The LP takes you through a subtle succession of vignettes, at times aggressively confident and brassy, at times veering towards an enigmatic elegance and sophisticated nocturnal developments. Through and through, the general tone oscillates between the playful and the elaborate, the sensual and the spiritual. A perplexing and yet welcome confusion indeed arises from the occasionally undeterminable origins of the sounds, as if technology and nature were reflecting each others. A release full of pensiveness, amazement and serenity.
Quotes about/from Yannick Dauby :
• “I believe that Dauby is enigmatic with a good reason: ultimately the sound sources are not overly important, the result is.” [ MR, Vital Weekly ]
• “Since years, I’ve been developing a double process of listening. One relates to nature sound recording, focusing on the amphibian fauna of Taiwan, and it is an outdoor practice related to humidity, landscape, night time and ecology. There is something that I always considered a bit weird about this passion : what pushes me to transform the acoustic waves produced by animals into electric signals ? Its counter-part is an indoor and private activity, a kind of audio onanism : modular synthesis. […] (wā jiè méng xūn) is an important step in a project hybridizing those two sides of my sound work” . [Yannick Dauby]
00:00 – 10:10 – Wa Jie Meng Xun
10:10 – 15:45 – Ketagalan
10:45 – 21:10 – 廠
21:10 – 33:40 – Arches
33:40 – 39:00 – 廠
39:00 – 48:20 – Analogue studies, 20.09.2013
48:20 – 59:59 – Otus spilocephalus, Fushan, 13.02.2013
