Name: Alexis Degrenier

Nationality: French
Occupation: Composer, percussionist, performer
Current Release: Alexis Degrenier's La mort aura tes yeux is out via Murailles Music and Standard In-Fi.
Recommendations: I would say: Samuel Beckett's Quad (without the music) + George Foreman VS Mohamed Ali boxing match (30 October 1974); the Sufi women's song from Mayotte DEBAA (ocora)



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

When I was young, very young, too young. I grew up with it ... inside of  me.

I think my first two musical shocks were the car's flashers, and the windscreen wipers and the pipe organ that my mother used to make me listen to in order to fall asleep …

Music was a kind of wandering friend. Sometimes I wanted it with me, sometimes I wished it would leave me bu t... it was impossible. If something attracted me, it was certainly because no other form had so many links with the world and so few at the same time.
 
When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

It is difficult to describe such a thing. Something crosses the body and multiplies it. Colours and particles replace the ambient air. Everything influences creativity in this way; a page being turned, something I read, the way this makes one think and lets the mouth name what is not said.

The first act (listening) is a translation but what follows cannot be expressed with words and it is at this moment that something happens. This something is something else, we reach the second act, that of transcribing, of making the notes and sounds appear, the third act is thinking about what is being done, it is undoubtedly where things shift, the following act (the 4th), allows the whole to be combined, and the last act (the 5th) is about playing and therefore starting all over agai n...

5 acts like the 5 fingers of the hand, but we have two hands!
 
How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

In a word: the accident. I don't know if I believe in all that stuff. For me there is no such thing as "personal", that would be quite pretentious. There are instants, there is time, durations and moments. What lies within these points attracts me.

The challenges are always political because one cannot move forward alone or autonomously. If we don't watch the world move, if we don't watch the current issues being addressed, then we miss out on life, and consequently on our own fragility and the fragility of not being anything.

Understanding that I am only a modest future pile of ashes is probably what animates me, and grasping that we can "remain in a different way", "draw a line" that will outlast us.

In short, it is to know how the small story lives in the big story of the world. If I have a challenge, it is to continue until the next time. I always lose a little more time to gain some.
 
Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I am privileged. I am a man, I am white, I live in France … And yet, I am sick, I am in a wheelchair, I am dying (and therefore still alive), I am at the intersection of several identities because of my fundamental concerns, and yet I am not subjected to the various oppressions ... I therefore have the ambiguity of diving in and fighting on these fronts ... and yet who am I to join all these struggles? What is the right place in these issues that I can take without inhabiting too much space?

I have only learned by living with this in mind ... and in fact the decolonial, feminist, class, gender and many other struggles … but in the midst of this I try not to interfere where I have no place of understanding while at the same time HOLDING NOTHING BACK and pounding my fist whenever I have to ... and there is no lack of opportunity.

But it would be inappropriate for me to talk about identity ... I have no territory and therefore deterritorialize myself as much as I can, often to my detriment. I listen to almost only to traditional music from the Near and Middle East, as well as music from the African diaspora, or from cultures on the fringes of my practices, while at the same time developing an attachment close to me with traditional music from the Massif Central ... and contemporary forms of notated music.

What can I draw from this? Probably an infinity of fragments that would be gathered to form a circle of circles.

My identity moves, I think, as much as the term itself ... In this sense I am often beside the picture I inhabit. And yet I am identified but always outside of where I stand. No doubt I have a plural identity but I don't meet it very often (laughs).
 
What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

The Idea is something rare and I hope to have one or two every once in a while ... or "a big one" sometimes, but it collides with others.

I think what interests me is a kind of ritornello where things are repeated with enough differences to create a rupture until the point of exhaustion. Intensity to the point of cracking. A kind of tension that would never give way but would become a ghost once it disappeared, the problem is to know what disappears when it is not ... a bit of oneself or a bit of what one touches.
 
How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

That is a rather complex question. I think everything is ongoing, there is no innovation without tradition. I don't look for originality or it would be in the sense the word has when you cut it, so that it includes the question of "the origin of..."

I prefer things to be untimely rather than timeless, or else to reinvent language; to talk about shifts of superimposed lines that co-exist in counterpoint, like several fluxes that determine the folds that do not cease to move in such a way that we no longer ask ourselves the question of the future but that of possibilities.

If the future contains music, I hope that it will be alive and in tune with its own history.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

I have been lucky enough to be exposed to several approaches. First classical percussion, then modestly the piano which absorbed me. I had great teachers who told me that I had to know how to leave, that certain frameworks would be harmful to me ... so I disobeyed them in a spirit of contradiction.

Then I discovered the music of North India, then the Maqams, and the percussion of these traditions ... I drowned in it by a perpetual coming and going, like the rest ... and my life changed. Everything was a halo of circles and work …

I would not want to forget the most precious tool ... literature,

From life, a challenge, not the least: it is called illness, or disability o r... but the dice no longer had the same number of sides ... and I met the hurdy-gurdy that had obsessed me since I was a child, and I now live with it as well ...

From there an instrumentarium was born that no longer has unity; a set of practices. All these practices are still there but they live in collision, or are intertwined.
 
Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Waking up, coffee, cigarette, coffee, smoke, thinking, radio chatter so as not to be alone or listen to what I am told elsewhere, not saying anything, (stop) going back to bed at 10am to wait for the nurses.

At this time I usually write with a close friend (this is quite important in the ritual). Then I try to look at the world through one stream or another, it is more or less successful. Then I write words and look at images, it's a job. It's time for the treatments, it takes about an hour ... So I eat, to be able to get to work (again) It's a classic day.

Work is living everything with a moving thought, work is reading as much as writing, as much as composing, as much as playing, as much as trying, as much as listening, listening is the central point from which all the rest follows ... then comes fatigue …I usually go to bed and fall asleep very late ... I wish everything would take the time to go fast.

Since this year, in addition to the concerts, I have the pleasure of preparing courses for a fine arts school, usually in the middle of all of that.
 
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
 
I think it would be like Al-Adhân* (call to prayer in a group in Islam). A set of ritualized songs calling for sensitivity and echoing from one place to another in the city … Everything is different because each day is repeated in a different way, each moment clings to reality but above all to the indefinable ... I am looking for this while knowing that it cannot be imitated or understood, but "something is happening".

This must be the spiritual, the "hearing together and acting". I think this is what I can hear without ever getting tired of it ... Listening without predetermined thoughts. So I don't make this music nor would I have the indecency to "claim to ..." but something happens in it that touches me more than anything else ....

*(Al Adhân: Sufi songs from the Cairo Institute of the Arab world)
 
Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

From my perspective, what is solitary must be shared, what is shared must have a moment of solitude. What is intimate is not said but does exist ... I am haunted by life in the creation of music, haunted by the ghosts of my life and what accompanies me, or a piece of conversation with a stranger or a loved one. In this way, when I am alone, I am surrounded by people.

In the context of collaborations or collective work, I believe that the last word before saying "good night" takes its place in the work the next day, like the colour of the first word the next day.

Everything must be on the line to function, if there are too many threads it forms a road and we walk alongside without looking at each other and then nothing happens, we are together in the picture but it doesn't form a corpus, a common body, so we have to cross the lines. There are as many risks as there are outcomes in a collective work.
 
How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

We should take the time to question "the world" and what "being in the world" is
 
I would like to think that music has a role in society, but there are "societies", "musics" ... My creativity (if there is any real creativity) is linked to the obstruction of the body and the possibility of being there and not being there, of being "still" there, against all odds, and exhausting the action. I would definitely be happier to see a concert hall with people of different social backgrounds, ages, genders, origins, but it's quite rare ...

So, what do we do from there? I could say that music has a role in society... but to say that about mine?

"Beauty does not listen, it transforms" Godard used to say.  

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

That is all that this is to me. Fragility, the power of it, death, language, the language of love and death. We only scratch the surface of this because  only ordeals do their work. And there are levels of experimentation and experience of this ... and consequently death as the ultimate glance.

How does one juggle it? Is it not fear that we should mourn, our very own? Illness contains all this and does not allow any indifference ... There is no refuge that is still when death (ours or someone else's) surrounds us. Dying is exhausting, while living is a field of scattered strains ...

So I would reverse the question for myself: "How have these questions influenced music and creation?" I would like to understand and have answers but I have many more questions to my answers than the other way round ...
 
"Music is remembering your future." It is perhaps in this sentence that I have concentrated a global answer, which shows my level of fear.
 
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

I see mathematics, possible links with physics … But I'm not very interested in it, except to make the technique as organic as possible. I wouldn't want it to be "the machine that does the work", but I quite like to look at what a machine makes and how it translates what is given to it.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?
 
Making a cup of coffee is very complex and not mundane! Cutting vegetables, sharpening a blade, watching, listening, discussing, all of this seems profound to me!

What I express in composing more than anywhere else, in writing or playing, is undoubtedly a form of communication with the outside world, something that must confront reality, altering for a moment what vibrates in the air by trying to erase the page being written. The more you erase, the more the paper changes ...

We always want to fill in the empty spaces, I think, forgetting that silence is perhaps an act of erasing and therefore already full.
 
Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I love to think that this vibration in the air fills the space in the long run until it exhausts it and changes its colour. If this music at this moment and in this space conveys profound things, it means that something that escapes me emanates ...

And so much the better because all of that becomes power in place of a certain might. Power knows what it is doing, might does not because it has no know-how and even less control … The important word is transmission because it requires a connection and this creates a link.

Over the past few months I have been able to teach at the Clermont Ferrand School of Art. Every day I learn a little more and better from these student s... In the end, perhaps this keeps me alive more than the actual playing ... It's a balance to be found, no doubt ...

I will always stumble until my last breath.