"You will be quite alone with your voice -
there will be no other voice in the world but yours"
Samuel Beckett

Noir gris seeks a voice that speaks or perhaps sings within a literary text that bears the title of a piece of music and which I thus hear in the silences of this Ohio Impromptu ("Un temps", notes Samuel Beckett in the margins), in the silences of these two men facing each other, one listening to the other reading the book of his life. The music of Noir gris is built on the phrases of the text. Fragments of words, by a small correspondence, quite personal and very arbitrary, becoming melodic fragments, the paragraphs becoming proportions of time. But at the same time, there is, in Noir gris, a way of dismissing all exuberance from the speech and voice, that which is literally human, by coverings, by accepted invasion of the sign, arranged, made geometric, the music proceeding in the form of blocs of disaffected, calibrated sounds. However, at the end of its advance, I like to think that something however is speaking with a far-off voice, and that this voice is addressing someone, as we end up seeing a human face amidst the vases and bottles eternally painted by Giorgio Morandi.

"‘At the end of its fictive cleansing, one might call the place of the being (or the system that attests to the question of the being in the shape of the place) a 'grey black'. That could suffice... black such that no light is bearable in contrast, the uncontrasted black. This black is sufficiently grey so that no light can be opposed to it like its Other."*

Jérôme Combier
translated by John Tyler Tuttle
Extract from CD booklet Gone, Aeon 2016

Recording

1 CD aeon, AE1651, Gone
Dawnlight, Noir gris, Dog Eat Dog, Terra d'ombra, Gone
Ensemble Cairn: Cédric Jullion (?utes), Ayumi Mori (clarinet), Caroline Cren (piano), Christelle Séry (guilar), AuréIie Saraf (harp), Naaman Sluchin, Saori Furukawa (violins), Cécile Brossard (viola), Frédéric Baldassare (cello)

L'Ecriture du générique, Alain Badiou, in Conditions, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1992