** Edition of 200 ** Microphonies 21 marks a new chapter in Marc Billon’s ongoing dialogue between acoustic matter and digital transformation. Over the course of four interlinked movements—each a meditation on resonance and transience—the composer builds an immersive environment where a single sound source, the Wuhan tam‑gong, becomes an entire ecosystem of tone, noise, and evolving silence. Recorded at his Paris studio and refined during residencies at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, this project reflects a meticulous engagement with phenomenology of sound: how vibration can shape perception over time. The opening section introduces the gong not as an instrument in the conventional sense, but as material to be excavated. Its metallic voices are struck, scraped, bowed, and digitally refracted, yielding drones that stretch into aching sustain before falling back into emptiness. The piece behaves like an aural topography, in which each frequency valley and harmonic ridge is slowly revealed. By the second movement, microtonal swells and feedback harmonics have begun to merge—the physical strike’s attack dissolves into the spectral bloom of its decay. This merging of live gesture and electronic afterimage defines the album’s structure: a parallel rhythm unfolding in slow motion.

Billon is part of a lineage that includes Éliane Radigue, Bernhard Günter, and Christina Kubisch—artists for whom sound is not object but state. Yet, unlike his predecessors, he injects a subtle tension between ritual and scientific observation. There is a palpable performative core here: one hears the composer listening back to his own sound, allowing the reverberation to lead him outward. The minimalist premise gives rise to a wide dynamic field; moments of quivering stillness erupt into storms of spectral interference, then recede again into near‑silence. Throughout Microphonies 21, the recording space functions almost as an additional instrument. Air, distance, and reverb shape the narrative as much as gesture or software. The listener becomes aware of shifting proximities, sometimes feeling the gong’s surface inches away, sometimes hearing it dissolve into architectural echo. Billon’s background in audiovisual installation informs this acousmatic depth—the sense that we are inside the vibration rather than merely witnessing it.

Microphonies 21 feels both concise and boundless—an unfolding of a single idea examined through infinite detail. In its patient, hypnotic evolution, the piece continues the French electroacoustic tradition while asserting Billon’s distinct voice: contemplative, tactile, and profoundly human. The result is less a conventional composition than a living resonance; a reminder that hearing, at its most attentive, is an act of presence.