Tristan Murail

Liber Fulguralis

Liber fulguralis is a 'joint creation' with musical and visual components developed simultaneously by Tristan Murail and Hervé Bailly-Basin.Inspired by the ancient oracle's art of interpreting lightning, this nearly half hour work elaborates on the ramifications of a single strike of lighting. Following a prologue with an unusual form - a single minute of almost imperceptible sparkling sound and light - and later recapitulated, to be 'interpreted' in innumerable ways... Ancient pretensions of divining give way to a poetic exegesis of one of nature's most fascinating phenomenon. Tristan Murail thus continues work begun with sounds of the ocean (Le partage des eaux) and of rain (Le lac): using recent techniques of spectral analysis, to dissect concrete sounds into elementary components, and then reinserting this material and its multiple transmutations into the musical space-time. In Liber fulguralis the sound's motion combines with that of the image. Hervé Bailly-Basin further develops procedures found in his preceding collaborations with Murail: shots taken at different speeds and scales are excerpted from fragments whose re-composition with completely synthesized elements brings forth a 'vision' of an entirely different order, at the limits of perception, of the imagination and of symbolism.