Erikm uses samplers, mini-discs and vinyl to create his music. It is not a real “soundtrack” but rather a propensity to fix and reduce, in a series of sound snapshots, the multiple material that he finds himself handling. He lives in the south of France, has experience and training as a visual artist, a long collaboration with the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier and the dancers of the Lyon Opera for whom he created the music for five shows, and various experiences with Voice Crack, Christian Marclay and Luc Ferrari. It is therefore not surprising that Erikm, or eRikm, churns out works that are placed in the realm of the most intellectual electronics – not at all sterile or boring – capable of finding an original synthesis between rock and contemporary music, between popular and academic using all the technologies at his disposal.
Worn vinyl, creaks and pops, the disturbed frequencies of old radios, the sound of the waves breaking on the stones of the Seine, all marked by a rhythm that is not at all linear and combined with elements of noise, concrete music and often silence. An anarchic attitude, in short, that seems to prefer intuitions and improvisations to the more linear sound frescoes of many contemporaries but not for this reason closer to the essence of things. Perhaps it is easier to think of Erikm's music if combined with images, with the movements of the dancers. And perhaps it is not just a coincidence that right at the end of his professional partnership with Mathilde Monnier, Erikm tried his hand at the soundtrack of Paris qui dort, a 1924 film by René Clair that for the first time addresses the theme of the deserted city.
South
Franck Hurley, Australia 1919
Australian Frank Hurley was the photographer of the Endurance, the English expedition that had set out to cross the Antarctic from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. The ship Endurance, hence the name of the operation, was destroyed by the polar pack ice, forcing the crew to undertake a memorable feat: to survive in the ice until Captain Ernest Shackleton, aboard a seven-meter lifeboat, with the simple aid of a sextant and a chronometer, managed to reach Grytviken, 800 nautical miles away, to organize a rescue expedition. Hurley bears witness to that extraordinary feat, which did not cost the lives of any man, in his photographs and in an extraordinary film document South.
