Co-published by the prestigious Museum of Ethnography of Geneva and renowned Swiss label Mental Groove Records, this second album entitled Chambre Sonore (Sonic Chamber) continues a new series of CDs devoted to contemporary compositions sourced from the monumental audio archives of the Museum*.
Julien Perez is a singer, songwriter and musician working between the music industry and contemporary art. Since 2012, he records in French under the PEREZ moniker for Dirty (Pilooski, Dirty Soundsystem) and Barclay Records, mixing pop songwriting, electronic music and narrative codes. He has collaborated with Saâdane Afif, Benoit Maire, Ange Leccia, Feiko Beckers, Julien Magre or Tony Regazzoni and likes to bring his sound to unusual places, generating new interpretations.
Julien about Chambre Sonore (Sonic Chamber):
"The musical pieces of Chambre Sonore have been created from ethnographic recordings to which I have added sonic treatments usually used to electronic and pop music, like delay, reverb, pitch shift, editing or superposition. By nature, an ethnographic recording is valuable as an archive, one listens to it as part of a whole collection aimed to witness the specificities of a musical culture in the most exhaustive and precise way.
Here, the 12 short musical pieces of Chambre Sonore, used in the video installation of Ange Leccia, are more likely intended to make the visitors aware of the incredible diversity of sonic textures that draw the musical map of our world, by allowing them to hear a (short) anthology of the most noticeable ones. Also allowing connections between various sonic textures suggests that a formal dialogue can exist between different aesthetic communities, chronologically or geographically remote."
*The Museum's Ethnomusicology Department combines two complementary series: a collection of about 2250 musical instruments and sound recordings funds, Archives Internationales des Musiques Populaires (AIMP), rich of more than 15,500 phonograms. These collections are representative of musical traditions from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania.