The recordings with Daniel Depoutot are from winter 2005.
It was bitterly cold. The windows of his more than 1000 m² big workshop in Strasbourg harbor were frosted on the inside. After each take, we shifted from one foot to the other - in front of, or rather beside a penis or bomb like, extremely dangerous looking space-heater on two wheels, a bluish flame fizzing out of it.
I put on heavy gloves over the light ones I used for playing.
I have worked with Daniel for years, that is to say I wander between his sculptures while I play. To wit, he is no musician but a sculptor, one who builds sculptures of all sizes out of wood and metal scrap. They are electrified which means, they move and produce noises: skeletons who batter oil barrels; suitcases which spring open and shut slam; whimsical figures on railway tracks with little bells; brooms with fluttering dusters; an ensemble of washing machines with open trommels in which stones of different sizes produce a hellish noise; or gigantic bellows like one uses for fanning an ingle, although on wheels and so big that you could employ them as a trailer of a full-blown truck if you knew what for; that thing groans real staid, produces a bit of draft, and there where the air escapes, there dangles a negligé which then lightly moves in the wind. So everything is a little bit ironical or tongue in cheek.
When he´s got a new exhibition we often do a concert for the opening.
Our tacit understanding: no aesthetic competition between us. For me this means: to resist the allurement of »joining in«, of emulating the sounds. So, no mimicry but: the peaceful coexistence of two entities which wave at each other from a distance in a friendly way, or, as the monk Ryõkan put it:
I don´t know others
Others don´t know me.
By not-knowing we follow nature´s course.
Perhaps a whole forms nevertheless that way: that both forms of expression become complete only together, like the body and its shadow whereupon casting doubt on who is what: Does the melodious element plus a certain purity of tone, as of structure constitute the body, or is it the accidental and anarchical part, plus the visual impression?
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