Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans

Trajectoires is a portrait of Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans through nine fixed-medium works, from Trajets (1991) to Fin de crise (2021), all realized at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain. The album is dedicated to her teacher Annette Vande Gorne, and travel in its many forms runs through it, from real routes to imagined landscapes.

At its centre is a trilogy she describes as a mirror held up to the pandemic. L’hubris du monde voices the anger of a planet sacked by human excess, with sounds donated by JJ Quinet. L’odeur du soufre was composed in quadraphony to immerse the listener in the slow spread of an invisible poison, and takes a modified line from William Shakespeare’s Othello. Fin de crise returns to stereo so that a horizon can open in front of the audience, with birds, locusts and wing beats as signs of hope.

Le parti flou des sons pays tribute to Francis Ponge and Le parti pris des choses by doing the opposite of his precise poems, diving into an indistinct magma of calls and screams. Ce qu’entend le noyé follows a drowning man who hears seagulls and his boat pulling away. Paysages, for her daughter Alice, shapes forest, sea, animals and wind into inhabited landscapes, and Voyage-mirages starts from Le nuage (1871), a poem by Louise Ackermann. Trajets was written to play with spatial trajectories on an acousmonium, and the short Voyage, voyage was made in 2006 for the 80th birthday concert of Francis Dhomont.

Born in Rocourt, Belgium, in 1954, Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans works as a cinema foley artist and discovered acousmatic music in 1984 at the first L’Espace du son festival in Brussels. After studying film editing at INSAS she trained with Vande Gorne in Brussels and Mons, and has taught acousmatic composition in several Belgian arts colleges. Landscape recordings and play-sequences are the basis of her work.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 21176, 2021.