all music by michel guillet

drawing by olivier nottellet
sleeve design by christophe jallais
special thanks to pierre-yves macé
ing-on 03

available on www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gRbqKJPdGA

live performance on www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gRbqKJPdGA

04/08/2015 Ed Pinsent in THE SOUND PROJECTOR
Itinerary Planner

Last heard from Paris-based composer Michel Guillet with his 2011 album Behind Nothing, which impressed us with the meticulous precision in its execution melded with its general determination to stare into the black voids of nothingness which surround mankind at every turn. Now comes Unstable Distance (ING-ON 04) which we received from the composer himself on 6th October 2014. At a time when those hideous black nightmares are increasing in number and dimension in the world on a weekly basis, we need detailed instructions like these from informed composers such as Guillet, simply to stay alive. As with his previous work, these two lengthy 33-minute pieces don’t stint when it comes to priming every physical object in sight with a thick coat of black emulsion paint, until the entire world enters a state of permanent midnight.
Unstable Distance is “about the concept of itinerary”, Guillet tells us, speaking from the toppermost tower of his haunted black castle situated outside Orly airport. Itineraries…journeys…mapped out with plot points. As abstract as his sound-art / music is, it still manages to convey a strong sense of forward movement, of a filthy van lurching awkwardly down a motorway at night, of rain and wind battering against a windshield. But the travel is halting and far from a smooth ride; the roads are covered with rocks, the engine sputters and whirrs. This is precisely Guillet’s plan; “the goal was to create continuity with discontinuity”. Through what I assume is painstaking and labour-intensive digital surgery, the composer has arranged layer after layer in carefully-engineered schema to arrive at this sense of a broken system, of travelling hopefully in the dark down an unknown road. Anyone can stitch together a series of disjunctive sound-collisions and produce jarring sensations, but it takes real skill to create a coherent pattern out of such an approach. It’s dark, fearful, and pessimistic in tone; the nearest comparison that comes to my mind is the music of Franck Vigroux at his grumpiest and most paranoid, another contemporary French genius who creates “black electronic noise” as I would call it (even though he’s a tad splurgier with his brushstrokes than the highly precise Guillet). Perhaps they both share a critical view of modern urban life; if they made an album together, it would be strong enough to make a thousand civil engineers and town planners hand in their notice.
This time Guillet also enclosed a printed list of his many accomplishments since year 2000. In the last two years, I note he’s played four concerts (two of them with Claudia Triozzi), produced the soundtrack to a move called France Liquid Territory, and contributed a piece called Radiophony: Haunted Hair at an international radio event in Hobart. I think the world needs more art-radio pieces about haunted hair, and indeed would welcome an entire series on this theme where parts of the human body become possessed and take on a life of their own.