2007 release **

"Between 2004 and 2006, Pisaro began a series of field recordings. Each time, it consisted of a single sound recording made in Los Angeles, in a single location, strategically placed so that nothing stood out, places without a center, blurred spaces at which Pisaro pointed a microphone without moving. From this series of recordings was born Transparent City, two monumental and epic double CDs in their duration: they exceed 4 hours and 40 minutes in fact. Each disc is composed of a suite of six twelve-minute pieces: 10 minutes of an unedited recording, and two minutes of silence. The recordings retrace non-events, capture non-places, they are disconcertingly everyday and banal. Thus, if we listen to them at the recommended volume, it is often difficult to distinguish this disc from the listeners' own sound environment. Urban traffic, the breath of the wind, a few insects and birds, distant conversations, the surf of the sea, a restaurant, a meeting room, distant air traffic, etc. Pisaro immerses us here in the rawest everyday life, a daily life without distinctive marks, a universal daily life such as we can hear it every day. As a sound document, it is uninteresting: the environment is extremely banal and the sound recording is far from being of great quality. I forgot to say that Pisaro also uses some sine waves that he "slips" into these recordings. An intervention that far from highlighting the recordings, rather serves as accompaniment and background sound. But surprisingly, I still find this series excellent. Because everything I just said could seem like a criticism, and yet it isn't. Because on the one hand, there's the duration. It can take time, but we end up playing the game, and these records can accompany us for part of the day. Sometimes we forget them, sometimes we concentrate, but listening is always disturbed. When we forget them, everything mixes up: the broadcast environment and that of the listener. And when we concentrate, the absence of traditional musical references, of sonic interest, and of forms, all this pushes us to search far, ever further, for the way in which we should listen. And that's what makes this epic series so rich, I think. Transparent City is a true provocation to the disruption of listening. As if Pisaro were asking us to look, quickly, very quickly, for a solution to the way in which we should, or can, listen to music, sound, the sonic environment. It is not about composing with noise, nor about reshaping acoustic reality, even if the insertion of sinusoids approaches this approach (insertion always very accurate and beautiful by the way), but rather about questioning listening, a desire to disturb it, to call it into question and to disrupt it. How to listen to the world, to music, and more precisely to minimal and extreme music. Pisaro brings an additional element of questioning more than an answer to this question by proposing this epic, radical, and austere suite. For the moment, it is certainly the most extreme and radical work that I have heard from Michael Pisaro: a disturbing, disturbing, and monumental work."