Florent C. Darras: Territoires

Three pieces are brought together here to form three territories.
Territories of creation and experimentation, of human encounters, and of time, in every sense of the word: these pieces are slices of musical time, engaging with time itself—through rhythm and form—but they also mark three distinct moments within a period of my life, three years separating the composition of each work.
These territories are not, however, self-contained. They touch, and sometimes overlap, and it may be in the album’s central piece, Territoires (2021), for eight musicians
conducted here by Julien Leroy, that the essence of the other two can be found—
perhaps I should say that they surround it.

The compositional principle behind Territoires stems from an observation I made in the field of biophony: a large number of animal sounds seem to follow an iterative logic, based on a process of micro-variation—in timbre, frequency, dynamics, and time.
I therefore sought to create a kind of soundscape music, made up of the
heterorhythmic interplay of imaginary species—or instrumental species—shaped by a profound ambiguity between what passes and what endures.

This sense of permanence is found both in repetition and in the idea of animated stasis, particularly in the string drone that seems to hold the entire first part of the piece in the hollow of a hand, or a valley. It was in Traversée, in 2018, that I first ventured into this realm of fixed harmony, not without a connection to certain forms of electronic music. In the passage (in French: traversée) from one territory to another, the initial fixed chord becomes the first object of transformation: it is a material that moves from the dry to the lyrical, then to the sharply piercing, and finally to resonant diffraction into silence.

This silence between objects returns in the most recent piece, Écart (2024), which takes up the principle of quasi-isochrony deployed across several voices in Territoires, this time as though we were listening to a single singing species. Around the single principal
iterative motif, a few insertions appear—secondary motifs, comments, ornaments—which seem to resist any conventional logic of development. The idea of the song of an imaginary bird gives this territory its almost fractured structure, like an ornamental form.

Florent C. Darras