1 ticket “ticket T+ OPTILE ratp — bus tm rer dans paris t sncf — carnet — stif stif stif — 005676486 i 0803 b 14”

«poor literature», that’s how french sound poet anne-james chaton calls trivial workaday texts like receipts, metro tickets, newspaper headlines and so on. he collects these kind of texts for years now, always on certain «événements» – media-related occasions which are of particular interest. chaton converts them into music. on raster-noton, he releases his événements n° 20 to 28, which deal with, among others, the investiture of barack obama or michael jackson’s death.

the fragments of literature and their musical arrangement remind, due to their precision, of the performance of a human beat boxer. chaton cuts, loops and samples the spoken texts and assembles them into staccato-like and hypnotising tracks. the text itself is treated like an instrument; its repetition, its inner rhythmic condense the song and push it. apparently random chosen phrases are isolated and their original message is transformed, their former simple meaning is extended.

anne-james chaton:
„I’m not musician and I don’t compose music. I “write” the sound: it means I use techniques from the literature to compose ‘événements 09’. All the sounds form ‘événements 09’ coming only from text and voice.

Main text is build with ‘poor literacy’ (receipts, promotional flyers, customer loyalty cards,…) coming a day. At the end of the day, this collection build a short story, because each document shares information like time, places, actions, names of people,…

Back sound track is build with the headline of a news paper of the same day. I record the headline with lo-fi microphone, really close to the mic, then ‘plosive’ letters like ‘b’,.......
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