“Sans Soleil’ is an immersive musical piece that brings the ancient traditional Japanese music of Gagaku into dialogue with electro-acoustic and electronic music within a liminal soundscape—a meeting and transitional space orchestrated by Puce Moment. Imperial and centuries-old, Gagaku encompasses the repertoire of court music and dances of Chinese and Korean origin, preserved in Japan and transmitted unchanged from generation to generation since the 5th century. In February 2020, Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel traveled to Tenri, a suburb of Nara, Japan’s former capital, to meet and record the musicians of the Gagaku Music Society of Tenri. These recordings formed the foundation for the musical and stage creation of ‘Sans Soleil’, developed in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Vania Vanneau. The music is suspended between contemplation and chaos, subject to a shifting and organic deterioration populated by apparitions, contaminations and persistent sounds that resist mutation. An invitation to the present—a ritualised celebration of the moment in which traces of the past are summoned up, ‘Sans Soleil’ questions the notions of transmission and the process of reappropriation, individual and collective memory, its representations, and its imaginary and mental constructs through what resembles a trance-like ceremony.” (Parenthèses Records)

“Puce Moment is part of the French contemporary music scene. Their music is climatic, often inhabited by a strong emotional power. A procession of harmonic structures organized in a ritual way, sometimes close to trance. It can be written or improvised, vocal or instrumental. The electronic and electroacoustic arrangements summon new spaces and abstract landscapes, which can go from the purest sound to the most raw distortions. Vast, slower, deeper – distant echoes of half-faded things – and when we are lost, voices appear. Voices whose only reference would be the timeless SeeFeel”. (Sub Rosa)

@ Sub Rosa