ARTIST STATEMENT

252 may sound confusing and, I presume, for some irritating – the whole crisis is for most of us confusing and possibly irritating, I simply tried to amplify the noise.

 

What most of us keep in mind are not the numbers but who around us got infected, sick, disabled, died, lost someone, lost a job, lost money, lost an apartment, got a fine for not respecting a curfew, got stuck thousand of kilometres from home, became depressed, etc.

It transcripts for me this feeling of torpor, uncertainty, to go everyday step by step. 

The composition is based on the statistics of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany. 

C-drik

Cedrik Fermont 
http://syrphe.com/c-drik.html

C-drik or Cedrik Fermont is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic and experimental music since 1989. His compositions and installations may vary from sound art and soundscapes made of found sounds and objects to more conventional “dance” music (industrial, electronica, etc.) to radio projects. He has toured extensively in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and his main research focuses on electronic, electroacoustic, experimental and noise music from Asia and Africa.

In 2017 he released together with Dimitri della Faille the book Not Your World Music about noise music in South-East Asia, winner of the 2017 “Golden Nica” Prix Ars Electronica in the “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category.

Track Name: 252 || Date Created: 9&10 Feb 2021 || Date Recorded: 9&10 Feb 2021 || Duration: 252 seconds
252
The title of the piece (252) corresponds to the number of deaths in Germany on one specific day, hence the length of the piece is 252 seconds.

The graphic score is time based only ; dynamics, notes, tempi are not directly connected to any numbers, rather than that, they are often incidental, sometimes repetitive and deconstructed such as the video for which I used some simple pixelation effects – they represent the digitisation of all data whose amount became so huge that it sometimes gets lost in translation; some information is repeated on and on while some other is being erased, hidden or misinterpreted. There are so many numbers and such a variety of them that we tend to forget what they represent (deaths per million, deaths per day, people infected per day or month, people who recover without after-effects, others who do not recover, death by gender, age, and so on). The over mediatisation of the crisis generates a lot of noise, such as this composition; the music and images are distorted and full of glitch like parts of the information we receive every day and some of the decisions that are being taken by the authorities or ourselves.

252 may sound confusing and, I presume, for some irritating – the whole crisis is for most of us confusing and possibly irritating, I simply tried to amplify the noise.

The portion of text is based on numbers of deaths, cases, and so on in Germany where I live but my voice is not very clear, again, it is confusing.

What most of us keep in mind are not the numbers but who around us got infected, sick, disabled, died, lost someone, lost a job, lost money, lost an apartment, got a fine for not respecting a curfew, got stuck thousand of kilometres from home, became depressed, etc.

 

COMPOSITION SCORE

Work

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