Gilles Aubry

AND WHO SEES THE MYSTERY

• Gilles Aubry — Field Recordings, Electronics

« And who sees the mystery » is a music piece based on sound check situations and rehearsals of Amazigh music recorded by Gilles Aubry between 2013 and 2014 in Morocco. Using his microphone as a sound processing device Aubry has transformed further his field recordings in the studio through performative feedback techniques.

Far from an ethnographic account, his composition is an abstract sonic exploration of traditional instruments, rhythms and spaces. It also features a poetic text in Amazigh language by Farid Zalhoud, “Tribute to the Ear”, commissioned especially for the project.

The credit list for And Who Sees The Mystery reads like a freak folk caravan mid ayahuasca retreat. Over a dozen musicians contributed, playing a variety of traditional Amazigh instruments. Chanted vocals drone behind blown reeds and clattering hand drums. Recorded in Morocco during sound checks and warm up sessions, Gilles Aubry challenges ethnography’s objectivity, preferring a messy expressionism. Credited with “performative feedback techniques,” Aubry conjures lashing razor wire throughout both sides of And Who Sees The Mystery. Stitching snippets of recordings using fishing line and rusty needles, Aubry’s collages soundtrack a universe birthing itself. The surreal montage peaks on side two: metallic overtones feverishly buzz, then suddenly expire, replaced with bird calls and throbbing feedback; soon, hand claps punctuate blasts from a zamar—a 12-holed, double clarinet used in war dances—snarling at passing cars. If this is the way the world began, humming in a dusty din, then we should return to it with open ears.
— Todd B. Gruel, A Closer Listen

Derrière l’épais rideau dessiné sur la cou- verture d’And Who Sees the Mystery, Gilles Aubry cache une nouvelle composition
faite de sons glanés en voyage – cette fois au Maroc, qu’il a sillonné en 2013 et 2014 avec Zouheir Atbane. C’est donc, après ceux de The Amplifications of Souls et Les écoutis Le Caire, une autre impression d’Afrique qu’il livre sur vinyle.

Aubry, c’est d’abord une oreille à l’affût, celle d’un voyageur qui cherche à découvrir ce qu’un paysage pourrait bien avoir à lui dire par les sons qui font son quotidien ; ensuite, ce sont des preuves d’une réalité à réinventer comme à distance, qui prendront les atours d’une abstraction à énigmes. Si elle révèle quelques constantes (feedbacks et sifflements d’origine électronique, présences d’animaux et de mécaniques, irruption d’un air de folk- lore…), la pratique sonore du Suisse ne lasse pas de surprendre : ici, au son d’instruments singuliers (voix, flûtes, cordes, percussions… qu’agitent des musiciens dont les notes de pochette donnent les noms) ; là, sous les ef- fets de « halos » (d’enveloppes, presque) qui
accompagnent la sélection de témoignages plus tôt saisis par les micros.
Alors, dans le même temps qu’il donne l’impression – peut-être n’est-ce qu’une im- pression, une fausse idée voire un fantasme d’auditeur n’ayant pas fait le voyage, en tout cas pas ce voyage-là – d’avoir traîné en ate- lier ou approché une fantasia, le musicien brouille les pistes (puisqu’il il s’agit bien ici de re-recording) et enrichit les nouveaux usages que l’on peut faire du monde – pour évoquer un de ses compatriotes, Nicolas Bouvier, qui voyagea beaucoup équipé de son Nagra. De sa nouvelle errance, Gilles Aubry a ainsi fait deux (sur)faces pleines et ravissantes.
— Guillaume Belhomme, Le Son Du Grisli #2/2017

My first thought as I begin reading about Swiss-born, Berlin-based veteran musician and recorder Gilles Aubry  and his new LP built from “sound check situations,” is that my soundcheck archive probably sounds a good bit different — not that you’d expect overlap with West Virginia wedding band banter and a processed mosaic of traditional Berber music. Recorded between 2013-14 and finished in studio later, And Who Sees the Mystery culminates a residency spent with local musicians in the magical city of Tafraout in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, exploring “Berber-Amazigh voices, instruments, rhythms and spaces.” Though an active collaborator Aubry seems best known for his holistic installation work with a variety of international institutions, so its appropriate that he would produce an engrossing album of threshold sounds and focused collage-work from his time in such an evocative setting. His processing draws out the individual orientations of sound check ephemera, percussion, bells, drones or digressions, smearing them into larger patterns or using them to rebound in new directions — resonating, ringing, wailing, or wandering. The resulting sounds elicit a sense of creation and destruction, tightly bound together, held in stasis for perusal.
— Dwight Pavlovic, Decoder #3/2017

Eis um disco para quantos apreciaram a associação de Ornette Coleman com os Master Musicians of Jajouka, patente em “Dancing in Your Head”, e que foram seguindo as não poucas combinações que o jazz foi tendo com as músicas árabe e berbere ao longo da sua história, com exemplos discográficos notáveis como “Noon in Tunisia”, de George Gruntz, e figuras que desse cruzamento têm feito notáveis percursos, começando por Rabih Abou-Khalil. Não sendo um álbum de jazz, “And Who Sees the Mystery” retrata todo o fascínio que o Norte de África e o Médio Oriente provocaram neste género musical, muito por via da admiração que Paul Bowles e os escritores da Beat Generation durante algum tempo radicados em Tânger dedicaram à música tradicional de Marrocos. Pois foi Bowles, precisamente, quem descobriu e começou por gravar a arte de Jajouka, o que fez com que mais tarde o guitarrista de rock Brian Jones, dos Rolling Stones, se interessasse pela mesma e, mais tarde, também Ornette o fizesse.
Ora, a devolução do arquivo de Paul Bowles a Marrocos, em 2010, levou à organização de um projecto artístico colaborativo que investigou a recepção local daquela colecção de registos e reflectiu sobre questões de preservação do património e práticas neocolonialistas. O artista sonoro suíço Gilles Aubry, conhecido igualmente como membro do grupo noise Monno, foi um dos participantes e este é o resultado da sua contribuição. Durante os anos de 2013 e 14, Aubry esteve a gravar ensaios e “soundchecks” de músicos das montanhas Atlas – mais exactamente da aldeia de Trafaout (visitada por Bowles em 1959), com todos eles devidamente creditados na ficha técnica –, utilizando de imediato o microfone como processador sonoro. Em estúdio, para além do trabalho de montagem desses “field recordings” já por si fragmentários e interferidos por ocorrências não propriamente musicais, acrescentou outros tratamentos electrónicos, explorando aspectos de ressonância e “feedback”. A partir da música Amazigh criou uma peça musical que a transcende sem a apropriar nem transfigurar, o que era um risco evidente. Algo de semelhante ao que já tinha feito antes com recolhas do dia-a-dia das populações de Kinshasa, no Congo, com materiais áudio do cinema de Bollywood e de funerais na Índia ou com bandas-magnéticas em que se ouvem prisioneiros da Segunda Guerra Mundial. O efeito Jajouka continua bem vivo…
— Rui Eduardo Paes, Jazz.pt

Over the years I reviewed some of the work by Gilles Aubry, mainly in collaboration with others, such as with Nicolas Field (in the duo The Same Girl), as a member of Monno, or in more ad hoc groups of improvisation, very rarely, so it seems, a solo work by the man himself. He is from Switzerland and lives in Berlin. Aubry calls himself a sound artist and researcher, using voices, field recordings, music and sound archives. On this new album, (so, perhaps the first one I hear from him that is solo) it is ‘based on sound check situations recorded in Morocco between 2013 and 2014’, and he explores Berber-Amazigh instruments and adding field recordings from the same locations, in order to built two sides of sound collages. This is some fascinating stuff, I must say.
This is not your usual layering of some water/rain/sea/forest sounds, but a rather intense trip in which Aubry manages to create a delicate balance between field recordings, which seems mostly voices from local people (but also animal sounds), along with instruments, assumed to be play by Aubry (wind and percussion mainly) along with some heavy electronic altering of all the sounds. That adds a whole sort of ‘electronic blanket’ on top of whatever else is happening. It also makes this perhaps a bit more alien than your usual field-recording album. At least that’s what it did for me.

It makes up for some truly odd layers in this music; sometimes it seems as if the sounds don’t fit, with animal sounds, looped rattles and feedback/overtone textures, but at the same time it works wonderfully well; while not moving at a fast speed, it is not easy to keep up thinking what you hear, processing the experience. Rather than thinking about it, I would think that the best thing is dive deep into this and simply enjoy the experience. This is headspace music and while it may sometimes a randomly stapled collection of sounds, one will no doubt ‘get’ the music one way or another, when played a couple of times. For me it certainly worked that way.
— Vital Weekly, (FdW)

Between 2013-14, well-commissioned radio producer and sound artist Gilles Aubry took to Morocco’s in-between spaces to collect and process the recordings he went on to map out this 38-minute composition or ‘sonic exploration of Berber-Amazigh voices and instruments, rhythms and spaces’ as the literature has it. The Berber are an Afro-Asiatic (but largely Islamic) ethnic group dispersed across Northern Africa, with concentrations in Morocco and Algeria; their languages a blur of related autochthonous tongues under the Tamazight umbrella. Reasons for Aubry’s interest in the group are unclear, but what distinguishes this recording is its distance from the motifs, the vigour and the verve one might expect from a part of the world so frequented for its sense-sharpening music. Indeed, hot countries are not usually known for such introspection. However, behind the curtain of our thwarted expectation, we may, perchance, bear witness to the titular ‘mystery’.

Much like the expansive sound collages of Sublime Frequencies (and as far back as the proto-collage on Sun City Girls’ Low Pacific), And Who Sees The Mystery is both an excursion through and remote from from the standard issue sound sources encountered in field recordings and fixed-medium electroacoustic both. It openly trafficks in faintly-familiar fragments (street sounds, bird calls and rousing musical performances), binding them with the dissonant yet adhesive properties of ‘performative’ feedback and a recurrent drone that tints everything it touches, till the whole artefact succumbs in time to sonic degradation: tape corrosion, piercing feedback and the dust of field recordings that demands cognitive reparation for our audio tourism. Neither travelogue nor scrapbook, the record is more of an interior tapestry of nameless voices echoing through the darkness of either an alienating reality or dispassionate dream world, at least inviting the listener to ruminate upon this strange, fictional realm.
— Stuart Marshall,  The Sound Projector (Loving The Alien)

Marokko vor drei bis vier Jahren. Der viel gefeierte und oftmals prämiierte Schweizer Klangkünstler Gilles Aubry, unter anderem Teil der Experimental-Noise-Combo Monno, hat Situationen diverser Soundchecks mit Mikrofonen aufgenommen und diese field recordings mit hochwertigen Soundprozessoren verarbeitet. Und wer sieht das Mysterium?, fragt Aubry. Wir wissen es nicht mit Sicherheit, hegen aber einen gewissen Verdacht aus dem hörbaren Resultat dieser explizit antiexotischen Arbeit. Konkrete Versuchsanordnungen für konkrete Konzertvorhaben abstrahiert Aubry zu nicht mehr identifizierbarer, sozusagen entwurzelter Klanglichkeit, die für sich eine neue Situation herstellt, einen dritten Planeten bewohnt. Das ist der Vorzug musikalischen Denkens: Man kann sich ganz woanders hinspinnen, als die Ausgangslage und ihre Bedingungen es erwarten ließen. An einer Stelle dieser grundgütigen Platte nimmt Gilles Aubry einen poetischen Text in Angriff, tribute to the ear von Farid Zalhoud. Dann wird es fast gruselig schön. Und das ist bei weitem nicht die erste brillante Veröffentlichung des Berliner Corvo-Labels.
— (felix, freistil #71)

Nach Antoine Chessex als Modern Composer rückt mit Aubry ein weiteres Viertel von Monno in den Fokus. Der Schweizer Klangforscher & -installateur in Berlin hatte bei “Urbanus Vulgaris” (2006) Vögel als bedrohte Indikatoren für urbane Lebensqualität belauscht, für “Echoes of Light & Darkness” (2010) den Holy Ghost Congress in Lagos besucht, für “L’Amplification des Âmes” (2011) sich den Boomboxkicks bei Meetings neocharismatischer Pfingstler in Kinshasa ausgesetzt und sich in Indien in Bollywoodsoundtracks, Bestattungszeremonien und frühe Tonaufzeichnungen vertieft.

Hinter dem Vorhang dieser LP erwartet einen ein klanglicher Niederschlag von “A Morocco Anthology of Ear Preservation” (2012-14), Aubrys gemeinsam mit Zouheir Athane durchgeführte Forschung über Paul Bowles und dessen Sammlung marokkanischer Musik, die 2010 von Washington nach Tanger transferiert worden ist. Feldaufnahmen von Amazigh-/Berber-Trommeln und -gesängen bilden den Kern einer weniger ethnologisch-musealen als klanglich-aktuellen Annäherung. Wobei das Ästhetische und Musikalische dem Alltäglichen und Allgemeinen untergeordnet wird, als ob Aubry einem das von Stimmen und Motorengeräuschen durchsetzte, von Feedback, Gezwitscher und Gebrumm verschleierte Klirren, Kratzen, Klatschen, Ghaitagetröte, Gedengel und dumpfe Tamtam quasi als Geäder einer sozialen Skulptur und als Nektar für Ohr und Herz vermitteln wollte. Auch der Vorhang findet seine Erklärung als “politics of invisibility by establishing correspondences between Paul Bowles as an ‘invisible spectator’, the veil as a strategy of resistance against colonialism by the women of the Addal music ensemble and the Pythagorean curtain of French acousmatic music.”

Kritisch, vielleicht sogar etwas hypokritisch werden bei Bowles selektive, antinationalistische und autoritär-reservierte Motive als sein verschwiegenes Geheimnis entschleiert, Einspruch erhoben gegen sein implizites Othering (Fremd-Machen) und gayatri-chakravorty-spivakistisch ein teilnehmender Modus dagegen gesetzt.
— [BA 93 rbd]

Παράξενο LP, σε πρώτη φάση, τυπωμένο σε 300 αριθμημένα αντίτυπα από τη γερμανική «προχωρημένη» ετικέτα Corvo Records. Περί τίνος πρόκειται; Για την πιο πρόσφατη κυκλοφορία του ελβετού πειραματιστή Gilles Aubry ο λόγος, που είναι ηχογραφημένη κατά βάση στο Μαρόκο τη διετία 2013-14. Ο τίτλος της: “And Who Sees the Mystery”.

Το Μαρόκο, ήδη από την εποχή του Brion Gysin και του Paul Bowles (για να μείνουμε στα χρόνια που μας ενδιαφέρουν περισσότερο), εξακολουθεί να τραβάει καλλιτεχνικό δυναμικό από τη Δύση, εντυπωσιάζοντας τους επισκέπτες με την αυθεντικότητα τής κουλτούρας του (όση, τέλος πάντων, έχει απομείνει από δαύτη). Έτσι λοιπόν στο δρόμο που χάραξαν ο Brian Jones, o Ornette Coleman και ο Rebop Kwaku Baah, και που κράτησαν ανοιχτό τα επόμενα χρόνια διάφοροι άλλοι (από την Marianne Faithfull, μέχρι τον Billy Corgan των Smashing Pumpkins), έρχεται να προστεθεί και ο Gilles Aubry, αφού κι αυτός ηχογραφεί με παραδοσιακούς μουσικούς του Μαρόκου (όχι Jajouka, ούτε Gnawa), επιχειρώντας σε «δημιουργικά» αυτοσχεδιαστικά, όπως τα λέμε, περιβάλλοντα.

Έτσι, εδώ ακούγονται τέσσερις Μαροκινοί από την πόλη Tafraout που παίζουν κρουστά, υπάρχουν οι Singers of Addal (επίσης από την Tafraout), ο Abdallah Haddou που παίζει το πνευστό zamar, καθώς και δύο ακόμη μουσικοί που χειρίζονται κρουστά και oujda (έγχορδο).

Ήχοι, λοιπόν, απ’ αυτούς, ανακατεμένοι με στούντιο recordings από το Βερολίνο, αποτελούν το ηχητικό υλικό του Aubry, που σε κάθε περίπτωση διακρίνεται για τον improv και κάπως «χαμένο» χαρακτήρα του. Φωνές, ακατανόητες σ’ εμάς, ανακατεμένες με field recordings και επεξεργασμένους, χαμηλής στάθμης, θορύβους, που σε συνδυασμό με τα τυπικά μικρο-ηλεκτρονικά και τους βόμβους, δημιουργούν, όλα αυτά μαζί, ένα άκρως ενδιαφέρον γειωμένο άκουσμα, που αγγίζει προς το τέλος του (β πλευρά) και πιο λαϊκές αποτυπώσεις.

Πολύ ωραίο το gatefold rap around cover με τον silkscreen πλαστικό φάκελο.
— Phontas Troussas, ΔΙΣΚΟΡΥΧΕΙΟΝ / VINYLMINE

In “And Who Sees The Mystery” di Gilles Aubry lo spostamento è netto, nei monti dell’Atlante presso la popolazione berbera Amazigh. Aubry, con la collaborazione di Zouheir Atbane, ha registrato e manipolato prove musicali ed altri suoni componendo un affascinante quadro acustico che unisce la forza visionaria e sciamanica, essenzialmente pastorale, delle sonorità di base con la sua sensibilità compositiva. Quello del musicista svizzero non intende essere tanto uno studio-ricerca di tipo etnografico quanto un’esplorazione sonora dalle forti caratteristiche surreali. Ad accompagnare il disco c’è anche un testo poetico in lingua Amazigh di Farid Zalhoud.
— Mario Biserni, Sands Zine