NL premiere

As a former lifeguard, Roméo Poirer’s dubby music has always been linked with water: from its washed-out samples to the soaking synthy fluidity that underpins them. His cult debut cassette Plage Arrière (2016) was a meditation on three Greek islands; follow-up Hotel Nota (2020) built on the beachy themes of his first album with a bubbling Balearic calmness. The wavy sensibility of Poirer’s music is bolstered in ways by the tidal movements of his songs, which are themselves often made with revisited samples that wash up on the shores of newer compositions. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” Poirier says of his ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops utilised on latest album Living Room (2022): “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.” Poirier has built a unique sound that’s as if The Caretaker has started an archival ambient project with Jimmy Buffett. That’s to say, as serious, touching, and intentional as the music is, it also has a sense of humour and a vivacious weirdness ingrained around its edges like salt on the rim of a glass. At the festival, Poirier presents a new audiovisual project entitled Tales of Entropy in collaboration with Ohme, a Brussels-based production, research, and education organisation working across art and science. The performance takes a microscopic view to the changing structures of organic matter – combining generative music production, live polarised light microscopy, and computer vision. Feeding video-images into audio-processing, this symbiotic performance blends the senses to create a hypnotic visual and aural landscape like no other.

The presentation of this work was made possible thanks to the support of Flemish Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, VierNulVier & STUK.

*This is a seated concert