This journey started as a regular pilgrimage to ubuweb:sound, shrine of sound-art and wikileaks of the avant-guarde… Ô Salvador, Charlemagne, Kurt et les autres, will I ever find the occasion to show you my devotion?

And then the discovery… A double LP featuring poems of Apollinaire read in 1968 by a trio of french actors, miraculously restored from oblivion and featuring on disk 1 / face 1, no less than La chanson du mal-aimé read by Denis Manuel, with Erik Satie's Gnossiene No. 1 in the background, performed by Jacques Février.

The mesmerized French native speaker in me immediately started to work on the sequencing of the track: by turning each of the sound-bits representing words into programmatic objects, it becomes possible to establish a dialogue between the spoken voice and the written text.

One hundred years ago, Guillaume Apollinaire, the ill-loved and copywriter of the new published Alcools, his first book of verse. La chanson du mal-aimé is one of the perls of the collection and this work is focusing on the first strophes of the poem.

Take a moment to read their English translation by Anne Hyde Greet, and let me quote a passage from the foreword of her book where Warren Ramsey mentions the "bold beginning in a murky London" of the Song of the ill-loved:

«London street urchin, fleeing Israelites, drunken woman reeling from the pub – all these are likened to Annie, as she is identified with l'amour unique and, finally, with the unattainable Absolute. The pursuer is at once Pharaoh, his sister-wife, and his army. So many analogous figures for hunter and quarry, swiftly and freely associated, bring us well along the way toward the "everything always present," the multidimensional time of modern art.»

More than two thousand years earlier, another poem was composed: The song of the Sea, appearing in the Book of Exodus of the Hebrew Bible and celebrating Pharaoh's defeat in the Sea of Reeds.

Quoting Wikipedia: «It is one of only two sections of the Sefer Torah that is written with a different layout to the normal simple columns. The layout is similar to bricks in a wall (see picture): the alternating words are supposed to represent the two walls of the split sea with Israel walking down the middle.»

Metaphorical text-layout? The mere mortal behind chronotext could not possibly ask for more, given the striking analogy with the following strophes in Apollinaire's poem:

The resulting work is a suite of four episodes played in a palindromic loop. Each episode consists of a dynamic surface serving as a medium for laying-out bricks.

Bricks are either associated with a word or empty (corresponding to music or a pause in the speech.)

The three first episodes are monophonic (one voice), with a camera movement synchronized to the soundtrack, while the last episode is polyphonic (many voices, different times), with a static point-of-view.

At any moment, it is possible to change the playing direction by pressing LEFT or RIGHT. Pressing SPACE will pause the soundtrack (the surface, wherever appropriate, will continue to ondulate…)

Acknowledgments

• • Thanks to my wife Hadar and our daughters Thea and Clio for their patience and support during this journey.
• • Thanks to the high-priests of ubuweb for the endless source of inspiration.
• • Thanks to Adolfo Roitman, Head of the Shrine of the Book for the insights on the Song of the Sea.
• • Made using the Cinder framework by The Barbarian Group.
• • Audio engine: FMOD Sound System by Firelight Technologies.