— What was the origin of this sound installation project for the Hyères Festival of Fashion and Photography?
I performed for Stage of the Art at the Hyères festival last year. There was a wicked line-up and in particular I discovered this English musician who I didn’t know and who I found superb: Eugene McGuinness. The director of the Villa Noailles, Jean Pierre Blanc, liked my concert and kindly asked me back to the villa for a residency. I took him at his word and we started to discuss a sound installation project in autumn of 2013. He was enthusiastic about my outline and the project came together very naturally.
— Could you describe more precisely what this project is about?
It’s a long piece of about 30 minutes that tells a story loosely inspired by the aesthetic project at the origin of the villa, as well as all the mythology that surrounds this place. The piece is divided into four parts that you can listen to in different spaces of the villa through audio headsets. It’s called L’HÔTE, and it tells the story of a man who comes to Hyères on a throw of the dice. After meeting a young woman on the beach, he finds himself invited to a château where he becomes simultaneously its prisoner, its invader and its architect.
— Is the format inspired by the work of other artists?
It’s the first time that I’ve produced a piece of this kind, this long and this literary. I had an assortment of references in my head while I worked on it: Joe Frank’s radiophonic pieces, Robert Ashley and Gavin Bryars’s minimalist operas, the Demy/Legrand collaborations, Dashiell Hedayat and Pierre Vassiliu’s logorrhoeic pieces. A rather strange family but a fascinating one.
PEREZ sound installation, April 2014, an artist in residence creation for villa Noailles & Red Bull Studios Paris