Corps

Description

Here are now fifteen years since instrumental saturation emerged, fifteen years of research, marked by works loved or violently rejected, opening major aesthetic fields. The importance of advances in the complex sounds of saturated music is now established. Its aesthetic has imposed itself worldwide as an essential movement of French music and finds resonances in certain works of the new generation of composers.
Long symbolizing and assimilated to the aesthetic movement of saturation, Raphaël Cendo, born in 1975, was willingly seen as the "punk of contemporary music," as Pierre Gervasoni wrote in Le Monde for his "explosive and dissenting scores" […] But his works, seemingly nihilistic, he continued, cannot be approached from the angle of "No Future." They prove that there is life after the death of assaulted sounds with or without electronics." This idea has made its way. Today Raphaël Cendo reaches his peak. He lives ascetically from writing and approaches all genres. The desire to crown his faithful collaboration with the Linea ensemble and its conductor, discreet yet no less charismatic and wonderful musician, with the release of a demanding monographic record, transforms into a burning necessity to accompany the great impulses of Raphaël Cendo towards the horizon of a new language.
These works are situated at this articulation. The composer himself says: "If my earlier pieces explored the possibilities of saturation of matter, they followed an evolution of which Corps can be heard as a culmination. Here, each timbre, each note and substance are an excess in themselves, a window of possibilities, a unique entity..." and "After Carbone and Substance, two scores where the total saturated was pushed to its extreme limits, Graphein undertakes a synthesis of more than ten years of research on complex sounds." Action Paintings is the oldest work, still vigorous, recorded at the end of 2016 (11 years after its creation), it bears witness to the journey, the transformation and, paradoxically, the permanence of the composer's obsessions.