Project "Le Cube Dans Mon Rêve (The Cube In My Dream)"
 |
| "Le Temps Et Le Regard (Time and Gaze)" CT |
RELEASED TRACKS
Cube 1: Le Déclencheur (Trigger) (Notes)Cube 2: Les Tentatives (Attempts) (Notes)
Collection inspired by CT's drawing
(TI writes:)
This collection of works, which will be presented over the next six months, is inspired by this drawing.
This is a work that my friend CT (Chiaki Tamura), a former fashion designer, drew when she was a student living in Paris.
It was originally a single piece of work, but for some reason she took it apart and reconstructed it herself twenty some years after.
When I saw this work, I wondered if I could use the idea of 'taking a piece of work apart and reconstructing it' in a piece of music.
When I talked to TM about this, he told me that he had also just seen an exhibition of Cubism at the time and had a renewed interest in Cubism and Impressionism artists and paintings, and we decided to connect this with my story about the paintings and use these as the basic concept for the piece.
Throughout the series, CT has been working on visuals and collages, as well as title ideas and sound suggestions.
"MUSIC CUBISM" -- developed from the inspiration...
(TM writes:)
As the titles of our past album "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" as well as our tracks called "Etching", "The Century After Dada", etc, imply, we FMT always pay attention to music in connection with visual arts, ie, paintings, films, sculptures, computer graphics, animes, theatre arts, and so on. Being "cross-over" is one of our key matters in making music, not only within music but also with outside.
This series titled "Le Cube Dans Mon Rêve (The Cube In My Dream)" is FMT's second attempt to link music to visual arts in some new ways, trying to form some style of "Music Cubism." Even though Cubism was a huge movement in the fine art, this is NOT expressions of our images inspired from Cubistic paintings, but rather, is based on an idea that we bring the Cubistic concept or methodology into music.
Our previous visual-arts-related series has a concept of making most of the human's auditory mechanism or especially illusion in order to inspire visual artists hopefully. This time, however, we have a very different concept like that.
Around January 2024 I visited an exhibition held in Tokyo, Japan of many Cubism (fine art) works borrowed from Pompidou Centre Modern Art Museum, which fascinated me a lot.
It did so a little bit too much and was too overwhelming; it never made me have an idea to make music from such inspirations. In terms of my (and our) music activities, on the other hand, I was looking for a concept suitable for a new series of pieces, like the title of the previous work "Searching For The Concept." I was having no idea at all to link it to Cubism.
Then, TI suggested me that we work on music for (or from) visual arts, since he produced such a music video as "Silence After You Leave (Live Version)" in co-operation with CT. Instantly, an idea to apply Cubistic approaches to music came to my mind.
Then, what I thought is "Why were there few movements, if any, between the modernism and dodecaphony in music?" In other words, the music history jumped from so-called Impressionism to Arnold Schönberg's dodecaphony, which is like Abstractionism, whereas the paintings passed through the Fauvism, Cubism, Nabis, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism and Neo-Impressionism (as well as Sur-Realism, Symbolism and Expressionism possibly) between Impressionism and Abstractionism, dependent upon the geographic area.
So, what could it have been like if the history had seen music Cubism in-between? That's the concept here. Also, it's quite interesting to create hypothetical music that didn't exist actually more than a century later, isn't it? But at the same time, this series of tracks uses today's technology, rather than instruments at that time.
Yet, there remains a question of what the "cube" would be in music. My basic principle is to regard a dyad (ie, two-notes chord) as a cube (or geometric shapes presented in such visual arts). Frequent use of dyads, rather than triad chords, is already one of FMT's almost unique methods, but this time we've developed it.
Each work in this project has particular developments brought from Cubistic methods:
- "Cube 1" applies Paul Cézanne's manners, which had huge impacts on Cubists.
- In "Cube 2" what's called the "Analytical" methods came from Pablo Ruiz Picasso and Georges Braque.
- (TBA about Cube 3 and later works)
Not only Cubism but also other movements in the fine art especially in Europe are taken up as themes, such as neo-Impressionism in Cube 1, a combination of renaissance and musical classicism in another piece, and development of what's called musical Impressionism in Cube 6. Purism, Symbolism and Structurism are adopted in part as well.
Additionally but importantly to me, we've upgraded the notation software called "MuseScore" to its version 4 so that we can use new instruments (or sound fonts) from Cube 3 on. My composition style is to write phrases that suit the tone, which is another reason why we've made something FMT has never done yet. Especially, strings and guitars sound great, in my view.
Just take a careful listen to them used in this series (especially after Cube 3). Those are wonderful but sometimes are unnatural with a lot of noise, which is interesting and attractive as well. As we can often see in the music history, evolutions of instruments or tools tend to change music itself. I can say that a tiny scale of such a change has happened here.
As a result, in overall, this music has reached far beyond my expectation. Even now I wonder how it's come out of myself. To me it seems like aliens' music...
With our full respect to the great artists early in the 20th century, including both fine artists and musicians, so many of whom were French-based, the titles of the series as well as the single tracks are named in the French language.
I feel very grateful to CT (Chiaki Tamura-san) for understanding deeply and very quickly what we were going to do as well as stimulating us a lot. In fact, throughout making this series, so many things have been unpredictable and, hence, music I had never even considered was created as a result. That's also thanks to her co-operation.
She, furthermore, gave us many, many ideas and options on the titles and arrangement of the tracks. Especially the former in French has been very helpful.
Comments