"PASSAGES SECRETS"
;)
2007
"PASSAGES SECRETS"
2007
"PASSAGES SECRETS"
("Secret Passages")
Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin have worked together for over twenty years.
Since they both cultivate their own solitary gardens and personal activities, they like to meet regularly to develop their shared sphere of interests.
The album "Passages Secrets" (Secret Passages), of an “electro-classical” nature, is the latest production by this surprising duo of artists who are admired for their longstanding partnership, outstanding creativity and the multiple facets of their music.
From the founding of the Emile Dubois Group in 1979 until 1994, Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin composed and performed all the music of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s dance, film and video creations.
The duo then composed for the image theatre of Philippe Genty (Voyageur immobile, 1995; Dédale, 1997; La fin des terres, 2006) and the shows for the Asterix amusement park in France. They also composed several pieces of music for the soundtracks of films (documentaries and fictional works for the cinema and television, Raoul Ruiz, Alain Tasma, Chantal Picault, and others).
At they same time, they reinterpreted their music for the stage and screen, resulting in the production of a large number of records. About fifteen albums, revealing their exceptional collaboration, have been published by Hopi Mesa and distributed internationally since 1992.
Their style continues to be closely linked to contemporary dance, both of them being among the most loyal fans of this art form. The phrasing of their compositions, together with the sensitivity and prominence of their themes, have made them ideal partners for all kinds of images.
Henry Torgue is faithful to the piano, his favourite instrument. He has also performed at concerts, and his recital (CD Solo & Variations, 1997, produced by Hopi Mesa) was distributed on an international scale.
Stimulated by their fascination for the relationship between music and other forms of art, they have diversified their approach to composition, leading to their collaboration with the choreographer Carolyn Carlson at the Conservatory of Paris (Ice, 1994), Lina do Carmo at the Dance House of Dusseldorf (Aruanazug, 1999), Mirjam Berns in Japan (Andro Gyne, 2000), François Veyrunes (Prospero, 2001; Frictions, 2003; Plaisirs chorégraphiques, 2004), and Bouba Landrille Tchouda (CD Malandragem, 2005). They have also set to music the songs written and sung by Anne Calas (CD Toxique, 2004).
As a composer and sociologist, Henry Torgue is actively involved in both music and research. He is the director of the CNRS laboratory “Ambiances architecturales et urbaines” at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Grenoble. His research concentrates on two themes: everyday sound culture, and imagination in contemporary urban areas.
As for Serge Houppin, after numerous experiences with musical groups, in which he performed as a singer, guitarist or keyboard musician, he turned to composition and the relationship between images and sound creation.
Synthesizers and the recording studio became his favourite instruments because they help him combine the acoustic and electronic aspects of his music.
From 1978 to 1981, he founded an audiovisual company in Athens, where he carried out duties as a scriptwriter, composer and sound engineer. In 1992, with the singer and dancer Pascal Gravat, he created an experimental rock group called Local, which gave a number of performances, in particular, the stage production of Don Juan by Jean-Claude Gallotta. As of 1995, he composed for several choreographers on tour in France and abroad: Youtci Erdos (Ad-Vitam, 1995), Sandrine Chaouli (Astan, 1996), Alain Gruttadauria (Hadas, 1996; Salé, 2001) and Groupe Zoîle.
Serge Houppin collaborates in numerous experimental projects that incorporate texts, electronic music, synthetic images, reports, documentaries, fictional works and stage creations.
He composed music for the choreographies by Christophe Delachaux for the last two parades of the Biennale de Danse in Lyons (2004 and 2006).
"VERTIGES"
by Robert Briatte
A red flower blooming in an urban greyness, a modern lady-in-waiting trapped in concrete, or a puppet, seduced and abandoned there by some vague worshipper?
The reply to the torments of this dervish in a scarlet dress, with enticing legs calling out to those wonderful clouds for help, can be heard in these pieces of music.
It is a music that is full of many other images, pushing its inclination for dizzying heights to the upper reaches of the sky. Dance, or rather a series of dances, the fourteen pieces in this collection pays tribute to the ballet or the staging that inspired them.
Hovering between emotion and lucidity, between feeling and irony, between evidence and mystery, most of these fourteen pieces do not last more than three minutes because of a deliberate choice to be brief.
They are like fourteen mini-climates developed in a spiral, bouncing from one to the other in such a way that one has the impression of hearing them spinning around endlessly.
These fourteen phases of life ward off emptiness, they are populated with characters, vivacious or limp, supple or clumsy, inviting us to listen to their familiar and eternal stories without words.
Was the word "evidence" mentioned ?
Cultivating the obvious is one of the main characteristics of the Hopi Mesa productions. Henry Torgue has an excellent way of expressing it. "Our melodies are already in the heads of our listeners; all we have to do is to make them really hear the music. We work on familiar ground, there are no intellectual extravagances in our compositions. Our main search is for simplicity. We reveal what is there already, and every member of the audience can claim 'I could have found that melody myself".
So whether it is in a minor or cheerier mode, we are close to the hearts of those who want to hear us. It should not be imagined, however, that the tracks of Vertiges will lead us along the beaten path.
Quite the contrary, the mystery is renewed with every piece, and one of the paradoxes of this album is that it makes us start from the end. "Ad Lib" is a very strange title for an introduction: murmurs of the crowd, indistinct words, distant echoes from the Djemaa el Fna square or from any other dreamlike landscape you may happen to cross during the darkest hours of your nights.
The slow, scarlet, Iberian, Andalusian procession, a nostalgic accordion slung over the shoulder ("Mr. Loyal, we are still waiting for you, what are you doing?". Ad Lib, with its touch of terror, is a brilliant way to introduce such a disturbing initiation into dreams.
And now our lady-in-waiting with the false air of a doll, starts to dance in the middle of the Djemaa el Fna, revisited by a Giorgio de Chirico. Vermilion queen of hearts, if I tried to embrace you, I am sure you would take to your heels.
Can music be described as threatening ? Muted, insidious, a threat does in fact emanate from this introduction.
It is not "The Concil of the Zoogs", extricated from the sheets and thoughts of the sombre Lovecraft of Demons and Marvels that will make us change our minds.
The Zoogs are among us. Their hopping band does not mar the procession, but a loved one, more beautiful than the Orient – the Orient Express obviously – starts to trouble it with the limpid movements of an airy dance: "The Naked Train" like the "Alice's Oath", is a bewitching tribute to fluid mechanics. The procession gets under way, its sails lifting in the light breeze of this inspired music. The tension is appeased by the elegy of the fugue. At this particular moment, no one would like to hear the queen of hearts shouting in the distance, "Cut her head off", "Where is the world going ?", with the misleading affability of a fanfare, played in a post-nuclear dance hall, is also mechanical,.
The chief of the troupe has a disquieting smile, the celebration will not be complete, it is evident, until you have been killed. It is clear that all is not well with the world, Mister, but it has to go. Where, then?
To get lost, Mister, in the humidity of "Malacca Bay", in the heady percussion of "Aruna Song", in the coaxing lines of the accordion and the light music of "Feather".
At this point, the first notes of the melodious summit of this record seep in with the splendid "Asraï", a desperate gymnopaedia, swinging subtly between derision and forcefulness.
It is played to a fairly classical accompaniment, until it loses its equilibrium in a slow descent to hell, down the abyss of the right side of the keyboard.A return to the Orient with "The Room of Hope", which starts with an ambulance siren, that reviled and badly loved yet adored Orient, that necessary and complicated Orient where everything leads us to the sources of ourselves.
The tribute is clear and impeccable, without the exoticism of a bazaar; it is a voyage free of illusions, despite the misleading title.
During a pause in a waiting room, in the anti-chamber of ourselves, we sway between amnesia and anaesthesia. A fascinating rhythm becomes insistent.
In total contrast to the majesty of "Angélie", here is a kingdom in which everything is music, with the discreet tension of "Soap", a miniature operatic drama.
And there is more majesty in the bitter view of the rediscovered atmosphere of fairground and mechanical music, in "Belvedere of Doubt".
A broken down merry-go-round turns, for the benefit perhaps of the ineffable "Mister Kite", who used to perform many years ago in the circus where the Orchestra of Solitary Hearts played.
So many years ago "Eyelids of Sands", a lullaby for a lost childhood, closes the album which had to come to an end anyway.The atmosphere is indecisive. One glance crosses another.
The procession has barely formed, it seems to us.
However this impression only lasts for an instant, for time has in fact passed, just a little over forty-six minutes, which still seem to be flying by because when the music stops, it can still be heard. It is time to go. Our eyes are red from having stayed up to watch over the cradle of our childhood, in an interval of life in which music is rocked between joy and drama, between consciousness and abandon.
This music should be heard loud, very loud, to the point of feeling dizzy.
BIOGRAPHY
In 1982, Serge Houppin joined the Group Emile Dubois to work with Henry Torgue on synthesizer and as a sound engineer.
Torgue's melodic and poetic universe and Houppin's world of percussion and sound atmospheres were gradually to fuse to create a music indeed written by four hands.
Each in turn plays the architect who maps out the outlines of a composition, or the designer who arranges the detailed decoration.
Twenty or so creations, each exploring further the relationship between dance and music, came to illustrate the extraordinary co-operation built up between Jean-Claude Gallota and the Torgue/Houppin duo.
Six compact discs contains the music from most of these productions.
Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin accompanied the Group Emile Dubois, performing live at productions in France and on the world's greatest stages across 25 countries and 4 continents (venues include New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, Tokyo, London, Brussels, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Montreal).
In 1992 the CD "Amour-Légende", published by Edition Hopi Mesa, confirmed that the duo's music was fully capable of an independent existence.
The "Ulysse" CD, issued in 1993, clearly illustrates this new departure, manifest as much in the continual broadening of their audience as in the many encounters between their music and the audiovisual world.
In 1984, Henry Torgue composed "Mémoires des Écumes", a suite for keyboards and symphony orchestra based on images by Christian Lejalé, created for the Rennes festival "Les Tombées de la Nuit", under the direction of Christian Lotito.
Since 1993, when he stopped touring with the Group Emile Dubois, Henry Torgue has been able to devote more time to his own compositions and to rediscover the direct acoustics of the solo piano in concert. To extend this emotional climate, he developed the Double Piano project, a creation for two pianos in conjunction with American pianist Sara Sugihara. Further joint projects are coming along with choreographers and theater and film directors : in 1994, Henry Torgue teamed up with Carolyn Carlson on the creation of "Ice" for the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, and with choreographer Kitsou Dubois for whom he composed "Gravité zéro".
In 1995, he also wrote the music for the film "Facteur VIII" by Alain Tasma, starring Nicole Garcia, shown on Canal+TV network.
At the same time, Serge Houppin joined Pascal GRAVAT in setting up rock group Local which explores the meeting points between music and video and focuses its musical research on voice and on sound landscapes.
After Jean-Claude Gallotta's ballet "Prémonitions" created in October 1994, Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin went on to compose the music for director Philippe Genty's new production, "Voyageur Immobile", staged at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in April 1995.The themes from this latest score form the basis for this third CD published by Hopi MesaVOYAGEUR IMMOBILE, released in 1995.
1997
"DÉDALE"
2001
A Sociologist and graduate in political science and PhD in urban studies, Henry Torgue has from the outset combined the work of a musician and composer with his university activity. A researcher with the CNRS (France's National Scientific Research Institute), on the Cresson team (center for research into sound and the urban environment), his work delves into the sound culture of everyday life, and the interactivity of sound and image. He has published a number of works ("Imaginary Cities",
