eRikm

Mistpouffers gathers three works that eRikm realized in his studio in Marseille between 2013 and 2016, two of them for eight channels, all mastered with Giuseppe Ielasi in Vimercate at the end of 2016. Each starts from a real place: an Icelandic landscape, a Berlin street, a hillside near Marseille. The booklet adds a long essay by the psychiatrist Georges Yoram Federmann, who hears in these pieces volcanos, burning forests and fireworks, and links them to the Malgré-nous, men forcibly drafted into the German army whom he examined for twenty-five years.

Draugalimur (Phantom Limb) was commissioned by the French State and the Ina-GRM and premiered in the Multiphonies series in Paris in 2015. It grew from a trip to Iceland that began at the Dettifoss falls, with ice breaking, the interiors of ruined cod liver oil tanks and old whaling quays, and an Icelandic tale, Móðir mín, í kví, kví, told to the composer by the visual artist Haraldur Jónsson, who also lends his voice with Dominique Poulain.

Poudre, commissioned by L’audible festival in 2013, comes from New Year’s Eve on the Eberswalder Straße in Berlin, where everyone sets off fireworks outside their building, a noise the composer reads as half carnival, half insurrection. L’aire de la Moure 2, revised in 2015-16 from a 2013 piece for Marseille-Provence 2013, portrays a patch of the massif repeatedly bombed with red fire retardant by Canadair planes, with a text by Paul Éluard read by Natacha Muslera and eRikm. It is dedicated to Jean Paul Barde.

Born in Mulhouse in 1970 and based in Marseille, eRikm is an improviser, composer and visual artist who began as a guitarist and was recognised as a turntablist and sound artist from 1996. He has worked with Luc Ferrari, Christian Marclay, Mathilde Monnier, FM Einheit and Les Percussions de Strasbourg.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 18151, 2018.