Sébastien Roux

Anamorphose #6 (past/present/future), 2017

Sound installation, a stereo sound file broadcast over two loudspeakers

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The Anamorphoses sonores corpus was born of Sébastien Roux's discovery in 2016 of the trompe-l'œil dome created by Andrea Pozzo in the late 17th century in the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola in Rome, while he was a resident at Villa Medici. A white marble plaque indicates the position from which the illusion is most effective. Interested in the principles of translation from one art form to another, the composer then wondered what a sound anamorphosis might look like, with a point, which the audience would seek out, where the music would take shape. At first, he experimented with configurations somewhere between concert and installation, with a rendezvous at a set time, but where the audience is invited to move around and spot successive anamorphoses.

In Anamorphose #6, created at Frac Franche-Comté in 2017, two loudspeakers are placed at a great distance (at least 20 meters). The sound content is a Bob Dylan quote from a 2012 interview for Rolling Stone magazine: "You can't change the present or the future, you can only change the past", whose phonemes are distributed alternately over the two loudspeakers. You have to be exactly in the middle to understand the sentence, otherwise only incomprehensible vocal snippets reach your ears.

There is an English version, considered original, and a French version of this piece. In the French version, spoken by the artist himself, the quotation is divided into two parts, each played on a loop for one minute.

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Sébastien Roux

Born in 1977 in Paris

Lives and works in Paris

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Sébastien Roux comes from a scientific background. His engineering studies continued at Ircam (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique du Centre Pompidou) in computer signal processing applied to music. By this time, he was already playing rock music, rather experimental, as a self-taught musician, and was beginning to take an interest in electronic music. He continued his studies at Ircam as a production assistant, notably for Georges Aperghis, whose almost visual conception of editing had a strong impact on him.

Sébastien Roux composes electronic music that he presents in a variety of forms, including recordings, public listening, radio plays, installations and sound walks, in line with his interest in the spatialization of sound. He works with algorithms based on formal constraints.

2011 saw the start of an approach based on the principles of translation, analyzing the structures of pre-existing works (visual, musical, literary) and transposing them into musical scores for new works. This process led to the creation of Quatuor (2011) and Nouvelle (2012), and continued with Inevitable Music, a series of pieces based on the examination of Sol Lewitt's wall drawings and the instructions left by the artist for their realization.

Sébastien Roux has also developed a series of animated graphic scores that performers and audiences watch in projection, helping us to understand the work and how it was created.

Alongside his solo work, Sébastien Roux frequently collaborates with writer Célia Houdart, set designer Olivier Vadrot and various choreographers, most notably DD Dorvillier.