Diane Barbé - Musiques Tourbes - Vinyl LP

Sound artist, instrument builder and field recordist, Diane Barbé makes their return on forms of minutiae with “musiques tourbes”, a weaving of wetland soundscapes and biomimicking synthesis.

Concerned with interspecies conjunctions while nurturing the planet as a finite verdant space, Diane Barbé plays with experimental music, listening practices and activism to bring attention to delicate environmental phenomena, that, despite their minute size, translate profoundly the effects of the Anthropocene while celebrating the living. Over the last years, in search of sonic signs in the landscape, Barbé followed murmurs in Europe’s wetlands which lead them to the “musiques tourbes” (French for “bog musics”). Musics made of animal rhythms, blown hums, and electronic simulacra that transport us, listeners, with Barbé into the humid zones of the planetary garden.

The album begins and ends with two biomimicking pieces — “le grand jardin de coupigny” and “le petit jardin de coupigny” — both generated with the Coupigny synthesiser, a Serge system, and a Vermona Perfourmer during residencies at the INA-GRM studios in Paris (2022-2023). In the isolation of pandemic winters, Barbé’s ears ringed with the dense soundscape of Thailand’s forests. Memories of moist jungles emerged and formed, like mock gardens of wild voices, through the dance of electrons in the circuits of the Coupigny — an analog modular system built by François Coupigny and later reproduced by Philippe Dao with original components from the 1960s. Floating together in dronesque fashion these waveforms materialize in gentle yet sharp clouds of insectean simulations. Strange signals, perhaps musics of some sort, reach our ears, giving rise to a mirage of odd landscapes, as if we were encountering a blooming ecosystem that didn't quite exist.

As a counterpoint, the album features two soundscape compositions both made of biophonic and hydrophonic sounds recorded in vulnerable European wetlands. Collected in Camargue’s river deltas during workshops with Phonurgia Nova, “les marécageuses” zooms in on the little-known underwater worlds of local ponds. Untouched and manipulated recordings intertwine to share a window onto the boggy existence of diving beetles, whirligigs, backswimmers, and many kinds of stridulating insects on windy afternoons. In resonance, “les enlisées” transports us northward into the orange waters of the Kahnsdorfer water treatment reservoir in Spreewald. There, under the surface, algae sing sunlit songs of photosynthesis amid rust-reddened wetlands and artificial lakes heavily contaminated with iron oxide due to the region’s coal mining past.

Nested at the heart of this interplay of the tangible and the intangible, “les hululées” lures and suspends us in the in-between. A hum, made of earthy tones, rises amid the buzz of wetland critters, and the pattering rain and rustling leaves of an incoming storm. Music has escaped circuitries and now manifests in the breaths of a small group of human sounders. These mouths play ceramic globular flutes gifted with nonstandard microtonal tunings, which are part of the Alien Kin ensemble — Barbé’s wider and communal sound project which explores collective music, nonverbal communication, biomimicry and synchronicity through group workshops and performances.

With “musiques tourbes” Diane Barbé offers a peculiar map into the bog. A sonic cartography that matches the tentacular sprawl of drifting algae. As listeners, caught between the organic and the electronic, the real and the imagined, we are left with little choice but to forgo our contours and melt into the surprises of these humid zones. Gifted with new planetary garden perspectives, we may begin to sense a possible world. One where listening practices and technology come together to nurture the collective imaginary in an attempt at resetting our environmental norms and reversing the shifting baseline. Field recording is at the core of “musiques tourbes”, yet what ultimately seeps through is an act of field remembering.

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Praise:

"What these remarkable tracks share is Barbé’s deep and attentive listening."
— Bandcamp Daily: Best Field Recordings

"the boundary between humanity and biosphere is blurred."
— A Closer Listen

"It’s a call to recalibrate our senses, to attune ourselves to the murmurings of a world teetering on the edge of transformation."
— Chain D.L.K.

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The album’s artwork features a mixture of photography and drawings, proposed by two of Barbé’s long term collaborators, Teresa Bartůňková and Pablo Diserens.

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Released 22. November 2024

12” LP 45rpm — limited edition of 200
recorded and composed by diane barbé

“Les hululées” was recorded in a meadow in Brandenburg during the Grabowsee residency (2023) with Alien Kin instruments played by Ebb Bailey, Jonathan Batomene Braun, Liav Gabay, Lisa Violetta Gass, Mia Oak, Joseph Summers, Çağdaş Sarı, Maria Sécio and Diane Barbé.

“les enlisées” was recorded during a field trip with researcher Jonas Dahm

mastered by mathieu bonnafous — design by pablo diserens
cut by dubplates and mastering + pressed by object (manufacturing)
drawings by teresa bartůňková — cover picture by pablo diserens — picture of diane barbé at GRM by didier allard © INA

published by forms of minutiae — fom13 — 2024