Research and creation residency.
The result of a collaboration between percussionist Tomás Moital and sound artist Pierre Carré, Membrana is a musical exploration in contact with skins: those of drums and those of loudspeakers. The membrane is a meeting point for percussion and electronics, since it is, for both, one of the elementary components of sound production - as much a tool for acoustic reproduction as a musical instrument. Thus, through organic porosity, percussion becomes a chimera of sound, while electronics becomes an embodied instrument: new hybrids are born from the interpenetration of two musical archetypes.
The musical program, featuring several contemporary compositions, is conceived as a continuity that maintains the porosity between electronics and acoustics, materiality and virtuality, reality and mirage. The multiplicity of articulations from a single starting point creates an ambiguity of musical categories, while instruments and bodies gradually merge.
Composed especially for the Membrana concert program, Convolution, a piece for augmented bass drum, seeks to bring out an unheard-of world of sound from the instrument's skin. The skin, taken as an interface between the acoustic and electronic worlds, is augmented by an electronic device using piezoelectric microphones and contact loudspeakers. This device, integrated into a feedback loop, increases the expressive palette of the instrument, which becomes capable of producing pitches, chords, switching continuously from one sonority to another and responding to the simple touch of the instrumentalist.
Pierre Carré
Composer and performer
Musician and mathematician, Pierre Carré is a graduate of the CNSMDP in Writing, Orchestration and Musicology, and holds a research doctorate in Mechanics and Acoustics from UPMC/IRCAM. His transdisciplinary artistic proposals, combining sound and visual arts, explore themes at the intersection of cultural, natural and technological spheres. Drawing on his research experience in the instrumental acoustics team at Ircam-Centre Pompidou, he now seeks to extend the possibilities of the classical instrumentarium and blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic music through the artistic implementation of various hybrid devices. In parallel with his personal artistic activities, Pierre Carré has for several years been conducting research into the work of Iannis Xenakis, whose mythical Polytope de Cluny he will reconstitute in 2022 for the Festival Manifeste, 50 years after its creation. He works regularly at Ircam as a computer music producer on various projects, collaborating with composers and artists such as Aureliano Cattaneo, Roque Rivas, Murcof, /nu/thing, studio ExperiensS and Qudus Onekiku.
Tomás Moital
Percussionist
Tomás Moital is a multi-disciplinary percussionist: both musician and performer, he performs both in ensemble and solo. A performer with director and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas for more than ten years, he appears alongside her in of ivory and flesh - statues also suffer(2014), Bacchae - prelude to a purge (2017), Mal - Embriaguez Divina (2020), and in 2023 will appear in her staging of Alban Berg's opera Lulu with the Vienna Radio-Symphonieorchester under the baton of Maxime Pascal. In 2019, he is selected as an emerging talent by mic (Centro de investigação e informação da música portuguesa) for his solo performance desabafo. In 2023, he played alongside the Percussions de Strasbourg in a performance of Ryoji Ikeda's 100 cymbals at the Gulbenkian Foundation. A regular collaborator with contemporary ensembles such as Sond'arte, MPMP, Epoch f and Coletivo Pedro Carneiro, he has performed at numerous international institutions and festivals, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Kustenfestuvakdesarts (Brussels), Kyoto Experiments Festival (Kyoto), Athens and Epidaurus Festival (Athens), and the BAM festival (New York).
Pierre Carré
composer and performer
Tomás Moital
percussionist