La Casa, Eric / Jean-Luc Guionnet

Inscape. Lille-Flandres

Label: Monotype Country: Poland

Inscape. Lille-Flandres is a concept album in three main parts. The first is a calibration of the audio sources used in the recordings. The second is a recording of the active mix taken directly from the desk while the installation was running. The third is a recording carried out at the festival installation itself consisting, as with the second part, of a direct line out of the mixing desk, with only standard balance applied to the tracks."-from the liner notes

"Much more information, in English, can be found on the release by Inscape, the duo of Eric LaCasa and Jean-Luc Guionnet. As Inscape they deal with 'site-specific listening installations', 'principally on the notion of 'background noise'. The review of their CD can never really deal with all the implications of their project (otherwise I'd be retyping the entire booklet), but they more or less scan the environment where a project is by means of audio and video, which are used in a live concert or an installation piece. 'Lille-Flanders' was made in 2004 at a disused postal sorting office, now a cultural space and a list of sounds is in the booklet. Best is to sit back and let the music just roll about. Cars passing, trains, water meter, the rain falling, incidental music from the nearby train station etc. Its all there. Other than LaCasa's solo work, this is more a collage like approach on sounds, with a bit more rapid mixing than in his solo work. It makes a small, but significant difference and it makes a beautiful piece of music. A very fine and solid work of field recordings."-Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

"Since, in our collaborations, we have worked principally on the notion of "background noise", defined at once as that which designates a specific place (each place, each point defined by the uniqueness of its background noise, its own distribution of sounds, frequencies, textures etc.) and as that which remains when the sonic ensemble which dominates our attention (that which might ordinarily be said to "interest" us) has been removed from the mass of sounds we hear, our projects are based on the idea that an analogy structures the relations between site, sound and the reception, or hearing, of those sounds: sounds come at us, flood our ears in 360°, defining as they do so a centre - which is none other that of the listening body. However, that centre remains also a postulate, defined as it is from outside to in, from sound's invisible horizon. Instinctively, we define a site as such (or are unable to define it otherwise): as a spatial totality, centred on a point, moving orotherwise, inhabited or not.

For us, the experience of a place comes from the brute fact of being there. One waits for a bus (forced to be there, without a choice as such) when suddenly, something specific, unique, singular, whatever it might be, seems to justify, by its very power, an entire life's work - taking over the body entirely. It is this power that defines and motivates our work. But why describe it as work? NO ! A life of experiences, rather, of activities, of thoughts and speculations, of feelings... each place is a point of view, a perspective on the world, all present in the being there. A difference arises however between simply being in a place and an experience of that place which goes beyond simple statement of fact. i.e. we haven't been everywhere we've been ! It might be, then, that we practice this form of art in order to assure ourselves of at least a minimal presence in the places we pass through ... and to try and share with the anonymous listener, via the artifice of the music, thishypothetical presence.

We are a duo and we each exist to lead the other to places he cannot go alone. Our approach can be defined as such: we work to place, or even to force, the 'natural' propensity we have for the contemplation of a site - its particular sonic properties and signatures - into a context in which this simple contemplation can be expressed through more or less complex devices, i.e. our work as a duo specifically serves to develop and complexify our individual propensities for contemplation. This we do in various projects intended to combine and integrate images and/or collaborations with sound artists, instrumentalists etc."-La Casa/Gionnet

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