Luc Ferrari - Multichannel Works (2025)

For an optimal and immersive experience, headphones are recommended. One can give a great number of explanations that might seem contradictory, according to whether one endeavors to present one facet rather than another. The difficulty is the choice of the facet, because they all are bound together by an overall organization. Overall I can say that this work was born from a juxtaposition of conditions having no other relation between them than the moment in which they were proposed; the friction of these so-called disparate conditions and of the shock of their heterogeneity. So I can also say that I believe in encounters and that I deny the chance that seems to instigate them. A certain number of problems were approached in this work – which does not mean that they were solved. The encounter between indefinite idea and schema, between schema and score, score and material, material and structure can only ever be a troublesome one. Or it instead explains the desire that one has to adjust things until they enter in relation with one another. I could almost say that there was a kind of expression born from these encounters that suggests the beginning of the undefined idea – and be content with this happy outcome.

The problem at the beginning was to give life to the sounds and that their development not constrained by the structure. On the other hand the general structure had to be intelligible and not derived from that of the sounds, but to juxtapose and even perhaps to oppose it.
Therefore a rather great number of elements were created,
representing a kind of orchestration, and then classified into
several families of formal, material or developmental character.
All the elements are in perpetual evolution, repetition is thus made impossible. This is the common character of all the employed musical objects, and it is precisely by their transformative characteristics that they were classified:
- Iterative with more or less fast rhythmic evolutions ;
- Samples evolving in terms of melody in a given tessitura ;
- Samples whose dynamic transformations produce combined and complex profiles ;
- Other more complex transformations still carrying out a true
polyphony of melodies, profiles and masses.
The progression’s zenith is obtained by the fast succession of small objects which form composite groups but which can be heard, depending on the case, as singular objects of very great rhythmic complexity.

I constructed Tête et queue du dragon from a text by Lovecraft whose poetic structure supplied me with the rules necessary to determine the sounds’ organization.
The work is divided into three connected parts.
The first part represents the dragon’s head which is formed by a discontinuous acceleration of the movements. Fragments of bouncing movements, chosen at certain moments of their process, are bound by sound samples which share certain common characters. This horizontal organization makes up each one of the four spatial tracks and produces a certain disorder. Very fast groups of notes however restore the order and the articulation in a structure called the "Vertical Unifying Principle".
Whereas the first part is spatially linear, the second is a path to a spatial and rhythmic structure. The body of the dragon is represented by a progressive fragmentation of the groups of notes inside of which elements of contrast are introduced.
The third part, or the dragon’s tail, is an extremely mobile and total dispersion of all the elements of the work. The transformation of the least fragment of all the employed musical objects could be used to rhythmise space.
[Luc Ferrari]

• Composed in Service de la Recherche studios
• Premiered in 1960, Paris during Festival de la Recherche
• Stereo version originally released on compilation Musique Concrète – Phillips works selected by Pierre Henry under the supervision of Pierre Schaeffer

Tracklist
1. Tête et queue du dragon (1959-60) [4-track version] (09:12)
2. Tautologos I (1961) [4-track version] (04:20)
3. Tautologos II (1961) [4-track version] (14:58)
4. Hétérozygote (1963-64) [4-track version] (26:25)
5. Music Promenade (1964-69) [4-track concert version] (20:31)