Michel Chion

Outstanding!!! La vie en prose is Michel Chion's first musical work composed in the 2000s. Thanks to musique concrète ways and means, it fulfils the composer's childhood dream of composing a Symphony of Energy in four movements of sharp contrasts. There’s no narrative in this one hour and a half long Symphony, but a cast of characters, some vocal, instrumental themes and sounds that circulate, disappear, pop up, stretch, decline and lose themselves in time. This work features analogue and digital sounds that have been carefully collected for 40 years. "Peppered with deadpan allusions to genre classics and pop music, humorous asides, some bold juxtapositions and often absurd shifts in register, and unexpected detours, (...) [La vie en prose] sustains its duration admirably, with expert control of pacing and momentum, interweaving a celebration of the sonic fortuities of everyday life with a surgical investigation of the perceptual process of hearing." The Wire #327, Nick Cain, May 2011