Kristoff K. Roll is the French, Paris-based duo of sound and noise artists Carole Rieussec and J-Kristoff Camp, who have been working since 1990 and creating sonic labyrinthine works «with multiple entrances». The duo has collaborated with improvisers such as saxophonist Daunik Lazro, clarinetist Xavier Charles, and guitarist Hans Tammen.
Les Ombres de la Nuit is an ambitious double album that attempts to be the sound library of the world’s dream stories, and is inspired by philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay on Dreams: «In dreams, words are random products of meaning, which is found in the mute continuity of a flow». Since 2007, Kristoff K. Roll has been traveling the world to meet dreamers with a mission to establish a dreamlike orality.
This work is divided into three acts – the 54-minute «Les Ombres de la Nuit / Shadows of the Night» features Kristoff K Roll electroacoustic sound art improvisations and field recordings alongside the spoken voices of the dreamers (all their narratives are in their mother tongues, and introduced by the sonic ambience of the recording location: Iraqi Arabic; FYRO Macedonian; Pakistani Pashto; Italian; Burmese; French; English; Catalan; Croatian; Bokmaal; Brazilian Portuguese; Arabic of Egypt; Dutch; Greek; Pashto-Afghan; Amharic; Albanian; Arabic of Palestine, and quoted in their French translation in a bilingual – French and English – 144-page that accompanies the album), created first in the form of miniatures created for Radio France; «La Grande Suite A l’Ombre des Onde / Great Suite in the Shadows of the Night» is a set of seventeen short sound art pieces mixed with the five musicians of the Ensemble Dedalus (including trumpeter Christian Pruvost of the KAZE quartet), who converse with the dreamers for an archipelago-like sonic journey, with each dreamer initiates a specific idiom; and the last, most poetic and playful «La Petite Suite à l’Ombre des Ondes/ Short Suite in the Shadows of the Night», with a quintet (including vocal artist-calrinetist Isabelle Duthoit and drummer-percussionist Edward Perraud) is an acousmatic composition conceived as «a sea of sleep», and it was composes entirely in their studio. Here, «Listening can capture the foam that settles on the timbral sand and then drift off into the distance. It is an incitement to wander through listening».
This is a highly immersive work that invites the listeners to dive into, slow down, wander, and lose themselves through the most intimate, vivid, surreal, but haunting dreamscapes of repressed passions and torturing nightmares of late-night and early-morning semi-consciousness. The music encourages the listeners to create their own images, to invent their own dramaturgy. The contours of the electroacoustic dreamscapes and the spoken voices are gradually blurred, sensing the listener into a disturbing but poetic timbral density. It is recommended to listen to Les Ombres de la Nuit with excellent headphones to fully appreciate the exquisite and highly nuanced sound art of Kristoff K. Roll’s dreamlike mise en abyme.
Eyal Hareuveni
Kristoff K.Roll [Carole Rieussec & J-Kristoff Camps] (electroacoustic), Ensemble Dedalus: Didier Aschour (guitars), Amélie Berson (flutes), Maximilien Dazas (percussion), Christian Pruvost (trumpet), Deborah Walker (cello), Claire Bergerault (accordion, voice), Isabelle Duthoit (voice, clarinet), Edward Perraud (drums, percussion), Patrice Soletti (electric guitar)
