Brief elegy to the pale | sound piece in octophony (31min32), field recordings and electro-acoustic composition
“If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again.” — Gabriel García Márquez
This sentence forms the basis for Brief elegy to the pale, reviving moments of momentum and suspension experienced by Mathias Arrignon during an expedition to the Svalbard archipelago in May 2025. Oscillating between the 76th and 80th parallels north, between land and sea, this journey amassed a collection of recordings, crystallising a profound connection that the artist wove with the Arctic landscapes.
The hiss of drifting pack ice, the shudder of glaciers and the internal tremors of frozen surfaces, these masses of water are made tangible through the use of different types of audio devices. This solid-state listening employs traditional microphones as well as more experimental equipment based on vibration sensors and hydrophones. This combination of technologies seeks to function as a means of blending into the landscape through its sound textures, gradually intertwining us with its physicality and its most intimate strata.
Infused in these environmental layers are subtle traces of the artist’s own presence: breath, footsteps, the embodied rhythms of moving through the terrain. Rather than erasing the author, the work allows these traces of diarism to surface as part of the listening experience. Their emergence opens a perspective often overlooked in field recording: the acknowledgment that every act of listening is situated, human, and vulnerable. These moments offer a fleeting pulse of subjectivity within the vastness of the environment, emphasising the intimacy inherent in encountering a landscape in transformation.
The composition took shape at INA GRM, a centre for electroacoustic and acousmatic music in Paris. Supported by the Phonurgia Nova programme, Arrignon developed the work in the GRM’s octophonic studio, using its resources to refine, process and spatialise the material gathered in Svalbard. Through a textured and structured sonic language, the piece tends to evoke the dynamics of a world in perpetual flux and invites the audience to experience its emotional resonance and environmental dramaturgy, oscillating its fragility and its power. Subtle electronic elements created with the GRM’s rare Coupigny synthesiser introduce an irreducible element of serendipity through its unstable oscillators and temperature sensitive circuits. This metastability became a compositional force, resonating with the shifting and uncertain nature of the Arctic environment and echoing the “here and now” reality of field recording in Svalbard.
By emphasising these sound recordings through editing and electroacoustic composition, the piece explores the ambivalent feelings of fascination and mourning that emerge in the face of the decay of polar landscapes. Listening becomes both attunement and witnessing. The work offers not a documentary of place but an invitation to inhabit its corporeal and ecological contours, where the slow disappearance of these landscapes becomes tangible.
Brief elegy to the pale invites a listening that is lucid and tender, aware of the impossibility of holding on to what is slipping away. It asks us to dwell within the emotional afterimages of a world transforming, and to consider how listening might preserve a fleeting trace of what once was.
private streaming link on request