The Shape of Flux
Philippe Neau
Deux Visions
(2025)
“Deux visions” is a moment suspended between landscape and imagination. The sounds resonate, muffled and distant, organic and powerful. Sensations, then images are formed. The sound mass heard guides us through the meanders of the room. Soon a “place” is formed. There is no story or narration. Just a space-time of vibrant, textured and colorful sounds. It is just a meditative walk, between dog and wolf, which opens to our perception.
—Philippe Neau
Darkness reigns here-at first. Then comes the movement, and then the thrashing. Undeniable forms are corporealizing and they are making themselves heard.
They’re rather high pitched, these corporealized things. What extension these seemingly unborn specters possess is held captive in brightness. At the same cyclic rotation there’s other activity. The low-deep is stuck in the pitch-black of a subsonic nether- ground. Compelled by an unseen intensifier, these low-deeps are struggling to lift themselves—to spiritualize in a way that the brightness can understand. A sense of curiosity about otherness sparks the circuits that aid in the disengagement from the roiling, bubbling dark-black.
In unobservable gradations, the brightness takes on the rustic hues of a nature not yet—but soon to be Real to these extended forms as they are drawn downward. Their inner states demand the spaces they will call home, if only temporarily. Of course, the strange symmetry of the illuminated actors in this play is not lost on the low-deeps. Their luminosity takes shape in similar gradations—growing brighter with each untethering from the captive ground.
The falling light merges with the rising materiality at the kairotic point of the time cycle—where the rising materiality congeals into the falling light. A perfect light-being: transparent, luminous, yet possessing body and extension comes into play as the prelude to the Real ends, and the main event commences…
… and the spiral turns again.
Images—Philippe Neau
Words—Michael Eisenberg
Philippe Neau, born in 1970, lives and works in Mayenne.
All my work tries to shape an imaginary landscape. Paintings, installations, films and music are an attempt to create this “place”, a place of the order of the “mental landscape”. My music would like to summon these imaginary spaces through a non-narrative form. It is made of deaf field-recordings,
organic sound collages, abstract notes, sometimes rumbling glitches, atonal melodies, metallic textures and distant voices. The atmosphere can be dense. The sound palette is contrasting and plays with shades between “dog and wolf”. The sounds swell. It envelops “the listener/viewer”. These soundscapes take him into a “full sound” and plunge him into the experience of an intriguing sound place.
—Philippe Neau
Check out Philippe’s bandcamp page to access his copious collection of recordings. He also has a linktree that covers all of his work including his wonderful art.
Darius Gylys
The Marriage of Rigid & Fluid
(2024)
From the very beginning, I was never interested in playing other people’s music. Over time, it became clear that I had little connection to rhythmic grooves, song structures, or even the conventional aspects of guitar as an instrument. Nevertheless, it remains my primary tool for musical expression.
When I play, I strive for a unique (digitally modified) sound, unusual sonoristic and phrasing effects, and the dualism of harmonic knowledge versus automatism.
Sometimes my music features several drones of fixed pitch; these act as a system of coordinates, allowing me to build the desired mood by freely adding other available colors. There is no beat or tempo, but there are some timing rudiments—an internal structure and dynamics for each individual phrase, sometimes enhanced by a digital delay (used with great caution). I would describe my latest works as “kinetic” music: partially predictable yet still quite random and expressive. Achieving a good balance between the rational and irrational was challenging—it took 15 years, but I’m glad I made it.People describe my music as something visual, and I tend to agree with them.
—Darius Gylys
Like many artists in the Acousmatic Crossings series, I wasn’t familiar with the music of Darius Gylus. I’ve since dug into his SoundCloud page, and I can safely and confidently say yes: I am one of those people he speaks of, describing his music as “something visual.”
I’ve now engaged with this track many times and have had as many unique, singular experiences as listens. It is (that is, the experience) what your imaginatio vera says it is. It could be one thing on Monday morning and something completely different on Friday afternoon.
But there is a bigger picture here. The role (if you can call it that) of the imaginatio vera is to “immaterialize” sensible forms (the guitar for instance) on one hand, and “imaginalize” intellectual forms (those miraculously nifty other things that are birthed from your imagination), giving them shape and dimension, on the other. To make this work though takes a discipline that, to be frank, seems to be in its death throes in our oh-so-modern age.
Attentive listening, active participation, intentional engagement—all these qualities are rapidly falling away in the commoditized world of artifice that is the now. When I try and activate my imaginatio vera, if I’m lucky, I get rewarded. It doesn’t always happen but the more I practice it (and I practice A LOT) the more rewards are given for my efforts.
I would like to submit that The Marriage of Rigid & Fluid—which, in essence is a solo guitar piece with gentle processing and looping—can act as a fantastic “jumping off” point to unwrap, stuff the batteries in and press the “GO” button on your own imaginatio vera. What will happen?
Maybe nothing, at least at first… but keep at it. I don’t think it will take long at all for you to start receiving the signals. Faint at first, and most likely very VERY cryptic—like the transmissions on a Cold War-era shortwave radio you pick up from some distant numbers station. It won’t be long before those faint signals are recognized as something else.
Those signals, —the plucking of a gently processed guitar—become sound objects that you notice, at first casually, but quickly, as something different, something more than what their surface layer first lets on. Let’s call it a “weirding” of sound.
Depending on your personal organ of perception, your own imaginatio vera, you can cultivate this skill: the ability to resolve sensory data into the purity of the subtle world, restoring them as symbols to be deciphered. That’s when this seven-minute solo guitar piece reveals its treasures, and believe me, they are legion!
In an age defined by simulation—where even emotion and perception are flattened into signs of signs, pieces like The Marriage of Rigid & Fluid resist the pull of the hyperreal. They don’t simulate meaning; they initiate it. What at first sounds like a processed guitar loop quietly becomes a cipher, encoded with something deeper, drawing you into a listening experience that restores the lost magic of presence. It’s not nostalgia; it’s ontological defiance. The real fights back, not with brute force, but with the quiet, radiant strangeness of the imaginal.
Try it and see!
—Michael Eisenberg
To hear more music by Darius-head, post haste over to his SoundCloud page.
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