JrF: when & why did you become interested in field recording ?
TT: 10 years ago, I started being interested in field-recording following a self-tought process. I was already making music and worked with a small synth ; I became very soon bored with factory settings and wanted to use my own sounds. So, I started to record sounds around me, using a small sampler and a microphone – within the limit of 10 meters between the microphone and the machine...
JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output ?
TT: I always considered my recordings as sound-materials for a possible composition, UNTIL I realized – 4 or 5 years ago – that some RAW recordings I made were better just as they were ; without electronic transformations. This fact made me consider them as complete "sound-pieces" and the choice of microphones placement could be a compositional method. So, today, my work is constituted for the most part of field recording based compositions and for the other part of unprocessed recordings which I like to call phonography.
Jrf: are the terms 'music' & 'sound' important to you, either in the way you feel about the sounds you capture and use or in the way your work is viewed by others.
TT: I'm not really concerned in doing something with a "musical" meaning per se or for others. I'm working exclusively via a "listening criterion" ; making something that has a meaning for me (musical or not). But the term "music" is interesting and linked to a tradition, a culture and changes according to places, countries, time... Personally, I love to diffuse experimental musics (mine or others) to a non specialized audience, from different cultures ; it always comes out something interesting. In general, I cannot separate field recording activities from social contexts
JrF: what effect (positive or negative) has the act of making field recordings had on the way you listen to your everyday surroundings and how has it affected the way you listen to other music / sound (if at all) ?
TT: For sure, doing recording as a discipline gives accuracy and makes the listening perception more sensitive ; allowing to focus on every sonic details of the environment, even the more subtle ones. I'm today much more sensitive to music of any genres in live situations because I now take in consideration, more than before, the main acoustic space in which music evolves. In this view I can appreciate (live) some kind of music that I was not really interested in, before.
Thomas Tilly can be found here
forthcoming....
jez riley french - ‘instamatic: snowdonia’
a document of listening, simply
6 tracks focusing on fence wire recordings & listening to the wind
available as a limited edition, full size taiyo yuden cd mounted on an art card + additional postcard
Review by Daniel Crokaert from 'The Field Reporter' website:
In his Instamatic series, Jez riley French invites us to share his moments of fortunate listening like they are, without make-up nor intellectualizations, retouches or alterations of the source, except a careful selection and probably a bit of equalization…
A hike within some magnificent natural region of North Wales, namely Snowdonia, led Jez to look particularly into the wind, that wind which speaks to us, while sweeping at the same timeendlessly across ever changing landscapes…
that air which circulates, lifts, makes particles, objects and surfaces vibrate, suggesting their outlines and concrete features…
But, far more than a report about a physical truth, the work quickly switches over to the extra-ordinary, underlining a very personal way of experiencing, of giving another dimension to things, and our environment…
Vast palette of amplified metallic resonances of fences planted in the isolation of a still preserved nature…agitation, vibrations, ferruginous supplications…a whole universe stands out, and submits to the laws of another one…a unhurried play of echoes and reflections coming out of the insignificant, and which reminds us constantly that our perceptions are fluctuating, eminently subjective, and tributary of their “captation tools”, but that they can also be the starting point of unexpected emotions…
“There’s an aesthete within us all “ seems to be, roughly speaking, what Jez whispers to us.
Through his care, his methodical record, his sense of listening, the creation of his own range of microphones, Jez acts like a revealer, a non-standard intermediary…
“Snowdonia” succeeds in closing our eyes slipping us into a long travelling through shaggy herbs, dishevelled by an insistent breeze – a Malickian scene…
Just next to us, trembling & bending wires, streaking the rust tones of a jaded vegetation…pebbles shrouded in history shape long grey veins studding the country as far as the eye can see…in the faraway, the shadow of hills asleep, peaceful guardians of a permanent sight…
In our ears, clicks, muffled murmurs of cold metal, aeolian moan, all the tense sensoriality of the world…
“Snowdonia” ends up ringing like the name of a mythical place where one has rendezvous with the other-worldliness…that other-worldliness, disguised under common appearances, here finely caught, and alongside which we often pass by in total indifference…
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