Esprits de Paris was created for the exhibition Sonic Process presented in 2002 at Centre Pompidou. That exhibition examined the development of electronic music in the past ten years and its relationship to visual arts. The American artist, Mike Kelley, famous for his installations that blend together sculptures, video and sounds, collaborated on this piece with Robin Rimbaud, alias Scanner, a musician and visual artist, who elevated ambient music to the ranks of conceptual art, using auditory elements in his installations and performances. Since his first pieces, he has used a scanner to intercept phone calls and radio broadcasts, in order to capture and mix the extracts in real time during his performances.

The sound work, which they conceived together, is built around recordings of silences and urban sounds, acquired at several spots in Paris where historical and esoteric events took place. Their starting point was the premise that these places preserve a memory of these events, but also of well-known people that lived there; a premise which led them on a tour through mysterious Paris, bringing them to Serge Gainsbourg's old home, as well as that of Tristan Tzara, past the address where Lautréamont died and to the tomb of Jim Morrison.

Esprits de Paris references the Electronic voice phenomena, experimental recordings of spirit voices from the end of the 1950s, led by Friedrich Jurgenson, Swedish artist and medium, and Konstantin Raudive, Latvian psychologist and pupil of Carl Jung. They tried to communicate with the dead by using electronic devices such as the telephone or the radio as a medium, with the disembodied voices manifesting themselves through rumbling on the tapes or broadcasted radio waves. The recordings of Konstantin Raudive were unused until William Burroughs reinterpreted them in his essay It belongs to the Cucumbers (1976). The ten thousand recordings by Raudive did not gain scientific value, but they did influence the work of artists such as Genesis P Orridge and The Smiths. Mike Kelley for his part, has been interested in experiments on tape since the middle of the 1970's, when he was making noise music and “concrete music”. He assimilates the study of emitted sound by a machine designed to enter into contact with a world of unknown dimensions through the use of ambient music. Moreover, the buzzing sound, the repetitions, characteristic of the use of machines, is often used in minimalist music, mainly synonymous with fantasy.

The places chosen by Scanner and Mike Kelley were simultaneously recorded on video and on a digital sound recorder. Attempting to amplify the properties of auto-recordings, the artists left the lens cap on the video camera and disconnected the microphone from their digital sound recorder. At the end of the recording, the seemingly blank signal is amplified by the artists, resulting in white noise, an obstreperous sound that contains all the frequencies of the auditory spectrum. The transmission's volume is exaggerated to such an extent that the slightest sigh or whisper is accentuated. Thus, all the anomalies detected on tape are highlighted and looped, treated in the same way as the voices recorded by Konstantin Raudive were, provoking a mystical and wondrous effect.

Priscilia Marques