Stèle pour Pierre Schaeffer

This work comes from a singular attempt: to carry over a sound paradigm, that of Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux sons animés, from one genre to another, from one universe to another, to transpose a form of the indescribable. The ineffable (the unplayable, the un-writable?) – of ingenuousness, of momentum, of the nonchalant and millimetric snapshot of collage – followed up, tightly shot, accurately carried forward like a fresco enlarged by squares, and finished off with an ample movement that gives spirit and consistency to the achievement.

As such there’s nothing laboured or scrupulous in this risky experience, only fervour and meticulousness. Here we meet the strong (and often controversial) musical language of Schaeffer, that of a renewed expression, surprisingly bold in stringing together unexpected figures, yet ingrained with the rules of a secret classicism. This, here in a condensed form, is an almost quintessence of the musicality of Dufour, infused for a long time by a dream, a brainwave, an idea: to make instruments chant an unknown language, to make them unfold an unaffected address, of absolute strangeness, and make it his own. [Jérôme Nylon]