Patrick Ascione

Figures de Son presents five fixed-medium works by Patrick Ascione composed between 1998 and 2012, all commissioned by the IMEB in Bourges, Ina-GRM or the French State. Published in 2021, seven years after the composer’s death, it opens with his own statement that sound today is to music what colour has always been to painting.

Two pieces were written for eight real tracks, part of the “spatial polyphony” Ascione developed from the late 1980s, building the spatial dimension of a work into the studio composition itself. Danse de l’aube (2000-02), commissioned by the French State and Ina-GRM and premiered at the Maison de Radio France, tests rhythm and its taboos in acousmatic music and explores sonic relief. Enième (2004), made at the IMEB, is about the bet involved in starting any new piece: giving life and meaning to sounds collected and left waiting, without context or history.

Ascionerie no 6: Fantaisie diabolique, commissioned by Ina-GRM in 2011-12 and voiced by the composer, closes the series Figures de style begun in 2003. He coined the word for his own habits and mannerisms in the studio, and here sets artistic research against the market, played by the devil. Divertissement (2001) is an attempt to make the genre livelier and more accessible, while Et puis l’oubli… (1998), a mention at Bourges that year, is a tribute to remembrance at the moment when the present turns into the past.

Born in Paris in 1953, Patrick Ascione trained at the GMEB in Bourges in 1977-79 and took the first computer music session at Ircam. He worked at the GMEB until 1984 and later taught electroacoustic music in Cherbourg and La Rochelle. His Espaces-paradoxes (1987-89) was the first piece in 16 real tracks. He died in Calvados in 2014.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 21171, 2021.