Working in the temperate Black Forest at the border between Germany, France and Switzerland, I became particularly interested in little sound devices usually called bird whistles or game calls in English, appeaux (“caller”) in French, and Wildlocker or Lockjagd in German. Game calls are most often wind instruments that use fipples or reeds to resonate hollow cavities, but they also include rattles, twisted pegs, membranes, and other ways to produce and amplify sound.

Little by little, I started to craft a collection of these sound devices: copper fipples, spruce recorders, “screaming” whistles, lamb bone edge flutes, rubber membrane geese callers…  Later, I started to explore materials like river cane (Arundo Donax), also called the singing reed, a hollow bamboo-like reed which grows all around the Mediterranean and has been used for millenia to craft music instruments, both bodies of flutes (like the ney, the pan flute or the aulos) and wind reeds (like the duduk, the zurna, the clarinette, etc.). Then, I turned to clay, one of the oldest building materials, to explore its sonorities and different physical acoustics. I started harvesting wild clay and processing it; effectively, to quote Valéry, following the path of an animal transforming biological matter into mineral (L’Homme et la coquille, 1937). Globular vessels, to use another term than the limited “ocarina”, are found in ancient cultures throughout the world (and like bone, ceramic is one of the best-conserving materials that we can study).

When assembling the instruments, I choose to associate timbres and frequencies in ways that feel non-intrusive, non-standardized, and as easy to play as possible. I am inspired from Bernie Krause’s niche hypothesis in which different species vocalise in different frequency ranges and different rhythmical patterns to avoid interference and masking. In ensemble performances and workshops, we mainly work on the notions of synchronicity, space and dialogue: how do we inhabit, through sound? how do we call each other, or respond? how do we express an emotional state? how do we feel together as group, or disband as individuals? Most of the instruments are aerophones, which has immediate rhythmical implications since the players need to breathe. It is crucially interesting to wonder –at what point does a chaos of tweets start to feel like a meadow in the woods? When do we begin to “feel” patterns and imagine other bodies, other temporalities?

“Did imitative calls of other species assist our ancestors in hunting? . . . When exactly was it that a person was so adept at producing a call during a hunt that he was asked to do it again for the entertainment of others or taught it to his children as a life-skill?”

– Ian Nagoski, Ecstatic & Wingless: Bird-Imitation on Four Continents, ca. 1910-44, released October 2016, Canary Records