Philippe Le Goff

Titakti gathers four studies that Philippe Le Goff composed between 1991 and 1995 at studio Canope in Lyon, the result of years spent with the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. The recordings were made between 1988 and 1993 in the villages of Puvirnituq, Kuujjuaraapik and Akulivik in Nunavik, on Coats Island and on Baffin Island at Iqaluit, Apex and Kimmirut. Le Goff calls the result a “speech of sounds” in which music, Inuit conversations, laughter, wind and light intertwine, and presents it as a personal, autobiographical account. Its form borrows an Inuit practice of creating a new myth by linking existing ones.

The title is a word of modern Inuktitut used mainly on Baffin Island for “white music”, probably an onomatopoeia for the singing of whale hunters, as Le Goff learned from Leah Nutaraq, 107 years old, of Cumberland Sound. Meta incognita, supported by a Villa Médicis hors les murs grant, mixes laughter with wind and shamanic drum. Nipinggit - la parole is built on interviews with Inuit on Baffin Island, Nutaraq among them, crossed by an incongruous alto. La guerre, the longest piece, is a dreamlike war fought with breath, laughter and words: chants arranged by Le Goff and sung by Élise Caron and Valérie Joly move towards trance amid the light of the aurora borealis, with horns, tabla, shanaï and Pascal Dusapin on Hammond organ. Plan séquence follows a sound recordist around Kimmirut, where the Sunday bells still ring.

Born in Le Raincy in 1957, Le Goff studied at the Conservatoire de Lyon, in the acousmatic composition class of Denis Dufour, and at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. A sound engineer for documentaries, he has researched Inuit music and language since 1988. The cover reproduces Spirit of the Raven by Kenojuak Ashevak.

CD in crystal case, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9524, 1995.