Pairing electronics with cornet, the duo of French cornetist Louis Laurain and US/Berlin electronicist Pierce Warnecke create an absolutely impressive and frequently frightening confluence of brass and sound, from slow interference tones to fully amplified microscopic elaboration, building environments that shift to surprise, alarm, and entrance their listeners.
"Pierce Warnecke and Louis Laurain have been working together for almost two decades. Their compositions and improvisations come from the idea of a collaborative sound creation laboratory exploring the relationship between acoustic and electronic music. Phonotypic Plasticity focuses on the potential modification of a sound in response to a shifting surrounding soundscape. Directly inspired by a naturally occurring phenomenon, phenotypic plasticity, in which living organisms (plant or animal) transform their DNA to adapt to changes in their natural environment. This is the compositional approach used to explore the plasticity of sound (its nature) and its setting in space (environment). For this album the duo combined electronic and acoustic sonic textures via imitation or dissociation to create core sound objects. These elements were then structured by shifting fluidly between composition and improvisation, followed by a third phase of multichannel spatialization, through both traditional speakers and custom systems (ig, mini speakers played through the trumpet). Space was also considered by borrowing from cinema, with the idea of juxtaposing close-ups (close mic'ed or extremely amplified sounds) and wide shots (distant sounds, room resonances, digital reverbs)."-Astral Spirits