< input > with Méryll Ampe
Curated by Julien Bécourt, the < input > series celebrates the union between the visual and sound arts. From museum installations to underground activism, from Fluxus to noise music, it will invite a visual artist to evoke his or her relationship with the resonance and vibration of sound, and to question the sacred link that the arts have always forged with music - be it minor or major, popular or learned.
After training in wood sculpture at the École Boulle, Méryll Ampe went on to work on plastic and sound creation at the Beaux-Arts de Paris-Cergy. During his studies, he assisted composers Robin Meier Wiratunga in Paris and Manuel Rocha Irturbide in Mexico City. He soon discovered analogies between sculpture and the practice of sound. He triturates, digs and excavates the very flesh of the waves with a permanent interest in roughness and porosity, building a sound edifice as if he were planing and carving with a knife in wood.
In his minimalist set-ups, Ampe likes to skirt the audible limits of sound and ruffle the speakers, from the tiniest high frequency to the most rumbling infrabass. He sees sound as a medium shaped in real time, based on improvisations using analogue sources (oscillators, filters, drum machines). By playing with the interweaving of volumes, perspectives and dynamics, he generates raw, sharp materials that he cuts, refines and arranges in the form of compositions that owe as much to musique concrète as to noisy improvisation or the edgiest techno. The influence of artists such as Mika Vainio, Kevin Drumm and Beatriz Ferreyra can be discerned.
When playing live, he is always attentive to the acoustics of the venue and engages physically with the sound material, instinctively and radically, depending on his mood at the time. His body serves as a tuning fork as he builds up masses of sound and granular modulations that unfold, intersect, mix and decompose. The result is thunderous bursts of abstract noise and rhythmic saturation. Méryll Ampe could borrow Laurie Spiegel's expression that electronic music has the capacity to ‘pulverise the structures of power’.
Her work evolves through different media with artists, musicians, choreographers and video-makers such as the COAX collective, the Supernova collective, Christian Rizzo, Mélanie Perrier, Fernando Vilchez, Elsa Brès, Boris Achour, Gwenola Wagon, Stéphane Dégoutin and Anastasia Ax.
