Pierre Durr, Revue & Corrigée
“The piece is far from inviting a peaceful listening experience; rather, it evokes a sense of unease in the listener, who is likely drawn into introspection.”
Armando Balice
Du Noir Tout Autour (CD-R)
Labelempreintes DIGITALesGenreElectronic
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Armando Balice’s triptych of inner gardens from 2018 to 2021, three acousmatic pieces in eight movements each built from ravens, forest recordings, analogue synthesizers and the cello of Lola Malique, starting with an Ina-GRM commission inspired by Japanese gardens. CD-R.
Du Noir Tout Autour is a triptych by Armando Balice around the idea of the inner garden as a metaphor for one’s private perception of the world. The three pieces were composed between 2018 and 2021, in Paris and on a trip to Tokyo, and share the same architecture: eight movements that run into one another, three of them short interludes of one to two minutes called Noir. They also share material: soundscapes with ravens, forest recordings, analogue synthesizers and recordings of the cellist Lola Malique.
Black Garden (2018-19), commissioned by the Ina-GRM and premiered in its Multiphonies series in Paris in 2019, is loosely inspired by Japanese gardens but more dramatic than their calm suggests. The cello is used both as a lyrical voice and as raw material for other sounds. Empty Garden (2020), premiered at the Futura festival in Crest by Éric Broitmann, treats emptiness as a full, quiet matrix rather than an absence, against an epigraph by Gaston Bachelard. Light Garden (2021), premiered at Futura the following year by Olivier Lamarche, looks for light born inside the dark itself, under a line by Samuel Beckett.
In the booklet the writer Guillaume Contré describes music of sharp contrasts, black and white, silence and noise, where a cello meets a flock of birds on the composer’s electronic dissecting table.
Born in Pontarlier in 1985, Balice is a French-Italian composer and improviser who studied with Jean-Marc Weber, Denis Dufour and Jonathan Prager, then at Ina-GRM. He draws as much on noise and metal as on acousmatic and classical music, designed the Alcôme acousmonium in 2013 and received Sacem’s Francis et Mica Salabert Award in 2023.
CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 25199, 2025.
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Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural
“Du noir tout autour does not tell a linear story, but constructs an immersive experience, a sound garden in which light and darkness intertwine, and the visitor can recognize, through echoes and suspensions, the wonder of what emerges from the silence.”
Radiohoerer
“Imposant, beeindruckend und sehr dicht prallen hier die von Armando Balice kreierten Sounds und Field Recordings aufeinander.”
