Gaël Segalen: SOFIA SAYS
Navel-Gazers #76 is an interview with Gaël Segalen who is going to talk to us about SOFIA SAYS. I really don’t remember when or how I discovered this album… I suppose that it can’t have been more than 10 years ago - it was released in 2019 - but I’m perplexed by that, as now it’s almost like it’s always been there. Something about this music really gets under my skin - the texture is electronic and yet simultaneously organic to the point of seeming almost earthy in its sonic consistency. It lures me back in from time to time - as many great albums do - not only with its sound but with its visuals, its titles and also in this case the curious liner notes written in reference to a “complex mythological entity” which is its namesake. And that’s perhaps the right way to listen to ‘SOFIA SAYS’, with the mythology of these liner notes somewhere on hand or otherwise occupying one’s mind as the sounds swirl by. When I proposed to discuss this album with Gaël, I called it “the one with the bug on the cover” and I like thinking of it that way: a familiar work which strikes just the right chord for me on certain days, maybe the days when I’m in a kind of red mood, like that particular shade of red on the cover. Maybe the mood that bug is in. It’s certainly the mood I’m in today, as Gaël dials in to talk to me from Paris…
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! First of all, who are you? Tell us about yourself and your background.
Gaël Segalen: Thank you for finding me, because my practice is quite eclectic and I come from a spectrum of diverse backgrounds in sound. My name is Gaël Segalen, written in a neutral way as it’s traditional Breton - but I’m a “she”, a woman in sound and I’ve been active in defending those identified as female in sound and music.
I was born and grew up in urban Paris with my ears quite opened to sound - from a very early age of maybe 7 or 8, I was listening to the free radio in France, community radio and also radio in foreign languages, and where debate has a lot of importance, people who argued in a way that was prolific, dialectic, interesting. So I come from this radio environment and also the social sciences, political philosophy and history which I studied.
I was interested in conceptual things, frames and human relationships and the question of what they’re based on. I guess in English you call this “humanities”.
AC: Yes.
Gaël Segalen: So I don’t come from art school at all. To me, going to an art school seemed super weird. To be growing up as an artist, this is something I was quite a stranger from, I wasn’t acquainted to that, but more to think about the frameworks of thought behind structure and social ties what later could take a certain form of care using sound as a social tool, facilitate relationships to others - to link up humans together - and I think this is what you can hear in my music, in ‘SOFIA’ especially. The way between the individual and the collective, and mass movements. ;
From social sciences I went to radio, at Radio France Internationale, independent of Radio France but with its international and worldwide distribution very much oriented to Africa, Asia, and with a history in “la francophonie” development with its programs in French.
AC: I see. Is that like the BBC World Service?
Gaël Segalen: Exactly. It was in the early 90s when it became more international with Spanish language and the Latin America broadcast and - since then I think it’s changed a lot with many more languages, and also the idea of francophonia is totally different now and very much questioned.
So I worked for a radio program based on migrancy, doing portraits of migrants. I did the same also in Catalunya where I spent a bit of time.
I was already doing some collages… but then from there I went into a bit of writing documentaries, and from there I went into sound engineering for film, as an on-location sound recordist. There I learned all the techniques about directivity of microphones and how to record sounds in different ways. That led me to be attentive to, in French, les plans sonores.
AC: …I guess the sort of sonic “field”?
Film led me to Los Angeles, in the independent film industry, and San Francisco so I spent some time in California. And from that I got back to my own desire to express through sound as I had done for the radio, sound portraits, not only being a technician. I met people from the Nature Sounds Society over there, someone called The Quiet American for instance, people that I could see as this mad scientist in a way.
When I went back to France I fully dove into sound art, and “crossfaded” out of film by 2007.
AC: I’ve had so many answers to this question and I can see that you really had your own distinct arc, getting into sound from the humanities in the stages you did. And so, you do call yourself an artist now, I’m sure.
Gaël Segalen: Yes, that came naturally later, it took a bit of time to accept it. I developed my practice in sound art that I call ‘IhearU”.
AC: You have used the term “danceable field recordings” as a way to describe your music.
Gaël Segalen: Yes in around 2008, Rinus van Alebeek coined that term for me. I said great, perfect. I accepted it, meaning I was already doing that kind of stuff. He was organising the Das Kleine Field Recordings Festival which was mostly in Berlin but came to Paris. My work was quite radio-oriented still: finding my own way in between collage, hörspiel, plunderphonics, radio art, music.
But that term is because I really danced in my life - I love dancing, clubbing and in California for instance I had lots of friends being DJs but before then I’d always been dancing a lot, and very sensitive to Afro-rhythms… house and latin music, hip-hop, funk, rare groove, free-jazz, UK garage to broken beat, stuff like that. And of course music from all over the world (from back to the community radios and ! the wonderful discothèque (music library) of Radio France).
There’s a hidden rhythm in sound - sound reveals an inner pulse. I try to sync and un-sync each sound according to its inner pulse, so I really don’t work on the grid. With the periodicity of each sound I try to reveal it a bit by mixing it. Lately on my last albums, for Chocolate Monk and Tanzprocezs there are some moments that are in evidence super-rhythmical, which before was more hidden (reference to les rythmes cachés like a motto, meaning even when hidden there are pulsations).
A prior example of danceable field recording track I did would be Symétrique à la Lune (of l'Ange le Sage, my first LP).
AC: Where do your field recordings come from?
Gaël Segalen: Before, I was insisting on working with only my own sound library. I taught a course on that: building your own sound library. I was also attentive to artistic collaborative sound libraries online. Sounds come from everywhere to me. I used to record quite a lot but now it depends on the project. I also worked on many Soundwalks in diverse locations in Europe.
If it’s a commission project I’ll create new sounds, or in the spirit of a concert I’m playing I will introduce a few sounds to service "the spirit of the place" as I used to say. For instance, in 2024, I was paired with a colombian artist by the Bremen Biennale Artivism section, and we worked on the Armero volcano catastrophe, using the sounds of the mountain Carlos Saavedra himself went recording.
in 2018 I worked in duo on a commission project for a piece based on the french national rail train sound archive. I love working with archives so now it can be sounds from other people.
So then I’ll work with a common corpus of sounds, a shared library. In workshops on this for instance we’ll name files collectively, decide what to name a file. This is a big piece of work in itself. The beauty of the language of sound, the world of perception, the listening experience, in a phenomenological approach.
AC: …how would you suggest that we dance to field recordings?
Gaël Segalen: Some people hear the pulse! Or plural: pulses. Each one catches something.
It could also be flying carpets.
AC: Right!
I have listened to ‘SOFIA SAYS’ maybe 10 times since it was released, and I still don’t really know what I am hearing. It’s an alluring mystery but now I’d like to understand it better. Please explain - particularly for those who are not knowledgeable about electronic music - how you made the sounds that we hear.
Gaël Segalen: This album was first released on tape in 2018 (then the year after repressed on vinyl and co-produced by myself included), at the invitation of a Greek label called Coherent States. I had released my first album in 2016 called 'L’Ange le Sage' which had some good feedback, leading to this label asking me to do a new work.
There’s a homogeneity to it, whereas I did some other albums which are maybe more eclectic. I had some pieces which were half-made, I finished some others and added some. It took me a decent time to have the current versions.
When you don’t know what you’re hearing, what I heard from listeners is that you get lost between worlds. There’s a shift between universes. I tried to create some, in French, bascules or tuilage. Shifting where you don’t know you’re shifting, or branching off and you enter another universe. There are many doors, let’s say, and you’re here in this room, and then not noticing, you’re already somewhere else. A friend of mine just told me he had the same sensation at my concert last week.
Attention is paid to what coexists and what transforms, or maybe not a shift per se but an unexpected almost unnoticed transition. Juxtapositions. Slippery ! Sticky. Distorted. Dissonant and friendly. Aha, as you like.
AC: So you’re tumbling through different states, disoriented.
Gaël Segalen: Yes that’s right. But then I try also to play with familiarity. So if we want to talk about kitchen tools or recipes, I try to play with memories: sound experiences, sound souvenirs. Each of us have references - if you hear children shouting for instance it could be about pain or joy, according to your experience. Same for impacts… an explosion could be fireworks or it could be war.
So with that semantic I try to use common points, common places, but then to bring them somewhere else and use the techniques we have as musicians - the modification makes it more uncanny. It’s between the two, familiarity and the unknown. That way hopefully I can bring the people - the audience - somewhere with me. From the outer to the inner.
By the feedback I got, people get attached to something and then without noticing, we’re already in another room, another space, scale, dimension. We switch dimensions.
AC: Right. That confusion for the listener, it’s exciting.
Gaël Segalen: Yes. Metamorphosis.
AC: One thing I love about ‘SOFIA SAYS’ is how it seems to have its own individual mythology, which is partially described in the liner notes. Who or what is Sofia?
Gaël Segalen: It came quite naturally when I was emailing with Manolis Pappas at the Greek label - for some reason when producing I imagined an epic, made of population mass-displacements. At the time I was focused on people crossing the Mediterranean, and that sea being a graveyard for people escaping, of course by the land as well.
Also then Sofia, la sagesse - the wise - but also then Lilith for instance, or let’s say all the figures of the divine feminine, even if the return to the divine can be pathological. An emancipatory archetypal figure. Could be the anti-nymph. So then it’s trying to climb on the mountain, to observe all those people being forced to migrate, to quit what they have. There’s a piece called Cortège, very much those people walking slowly, with torches, forming a body, one body of really suffering people to be sure. That path, the way they walk together and the feet on the ground mark a rhythm, a trace.
Also for the more esoteric of you, it could also extend to the Pistis Sophia, but I won’t go there as these aren't my tools, my approach is often intuitive and in a direct contact to things I don't mentalize too much and then it happens sometimes that it refers to some entities and mythological and spiritual references. It’s a clash of different cultures and influences. Anyway, it’s Pandora’s box, not for troubles, but curiosity.
AC: A cortège is… a funeral procession right?
Gaël Segalen: Yes it could be. For any kind of ceremony and ritual, a common body as I said. I’m very interested in processions. But I didn’t do research to prepare the album in that sense, it’s more to intuitively see what’s coming to me. And the album title, the woman could be the Pythia in a way (oracle, prophecy) to send signals, predict exoduses, but I wouldn’t reduce it to her either. She could see and she could hear what’s happening, and she’s warning. Cosmovision.
There’s a London sound artist Aura Satz, i recently saw she did something about alarms, a film documentary. There are many artists who have worked on reimagining the siren sound in the frame of our days as a call for attention and action. I’ve always been interested in the sound of the siren, the alarms, as a signal to wake up. It’s an awakening to be vigilant, because that’s something we’re losing so much, attention and vigilance, everything becoming such a lie and passivity. I for instance made such sounds with synthesizers and by recording craftsmen in that creation “Coeurs Manifestes” I did in a residency in 2021 marked by Covid.
Sofia, she observes. She sees and watches and she understands. She’s not perfect either. But, I am not Sofia. Maybe it’s tempting to be associated with a mythological identity in our days, to feel elected - I’m channeling for sure like many others (artists?) do, but I don’t place the emphasis on that. Receiving, interpreting, sharing, shaking, approaching life mysteries.
The Sofia figure allows me to talk about how we as women, we’re so alert, but it’s a danger also to be in that position because we are too much exposed. I think the music speaks by itself in that sense, there’s something quite strong, building up in intensity but also vulnerability.
For instance you were asking about Montagne Ouest…
AC: …is it your voice on ‘Montagne Ouest’?
Gaël Segalen: Yes. Well this is how vulnerability is important in the process as well. For instance, I wouldn’t place the strongest piece to start the album, to catch people. I would place it near the end, and maybe listeners won’t go till there but whatever. To be off key and do with contradictions is important.
By now I have made some more progress in voicing, but at the time because of some blocage I was shy so it’s fragile. It was good for me to express and work with my voice which I do more now.
But then ‘Montagne Ouest’ with the synthesiser and sequencers, for me as the sound artist not being much trained in music but a few years when young in violin, piano, transverse flute, is also like the archetypal musical piece. There’s some phrase and melody, it could be associated with a musical genre, more poppy, dark pop?
AC: What is the relationship between ‘Montagne Ouest’ and Montagne Est?
Gaël Segalen: Those two pieces are the two sides of the mountain, and the pieces are mirroring - one is recalling the memory of the other one, so it’s about a shift in time, but just right there. So we talked about switching spaces, but also time - I am fascinated by time. We’re switching in time, but right there.
AC: Aha. And so when you mention Sofia on the mountain, that’s connected to this conceptually.
Gaël Segalen: Yes. At some point we can climb up and we can see from both.
It’s also about the elements. The sky’s getting super-charged, lots of grey, tempests coming in, a tornado… natural disorder. Element noises.
AC: I see. And on the mountain you see the big sky.
Gaël Segalen: Yes you’re approaching the sky. It’s multi-dimensional - you look up, you can see all around… it’s also a way to get some perspectives on things, and a technical way to talk about landscapes and soundscapes. To face disturbances. It’s switching perspective. You’re climbing and trying to elevate.
Gaël Segalen: Ha! Yes.
AC: This image also features a distinct shade of red which has been inseparable from my experience of listening to the music. How did you decide on this shade of red, and what else can you tell us about this image?
Gaël Segalen: Well I think first it wasn’t red, we did many vivid colour tests…
But here is the story. I was in the garden of my very close friend Isabelle Rabaud, right in the geographical centre of France at mile marker zero. It’s a region known for sorcery, you have big forests there, a lung. I was in the garden at her parents’ house and I was in conversation with the label and I decided I want to suggest a visual.
Isabelle’s father has a collection of beetles. So first of all the bug is his bug. It’s a beautiful kind of beetle, and the mushrooms are there and the sun is there - Egyptian sun. All of this is not pre-worked, it’s in the moment. We made this nature morte (still life) in the garden. She used to be a photographer, so she helped me but we did together the assemblage of elements for the cover.
With the beetle I found that this is really the persona and discerned that it’s quite mythological - and rural, which I like. It’s earthy. I was at that age now where I’m trying to work on my origins, and a thing about not always having to go so far to find out who I am. So I appreciated the agricultural environment and the rural aspect of it. Not saying that my grandparents were peasants, but one of my grandfathers was very much connected to the earth and gardening and building stuff with hands and killing the animals for the family to eat them.
It’s quite charged, the image. It could be fractal, with the details on the mushrooms. It’s macro. And there’s no other figure, just one figure - this is Sofia, I suppose.
The red, it’s the label that suggested. The vinyl is red too.
AC: It’s not just that it’s red. It’s that red.
Gaël Segalen: Haha!
But if I do remember, that’s the contribution of the label. There are two people, Manolis and John.
John Kontan, he’s a graphic designer. We made different tests with Isabelle, in different colours, and then they said we’d like to do it red.
AC: They really responded to the music there. They really understood it, I think.
Gaël Segalen: Yeah! A great conversation…and we did a special limited edition with the test pressings, numbered and signed, with John doing individually hand-drawn for the cover and postcards. I can send that to you for you to see. It’s a different aesthetic, interpreted by painting which adds another universe to the release. I still have a few to sell by the way.
AC: You are based in Paris. What’s your experience of making experimental music in Paris and how do you think this location has or hasn’t affected the style or character of your work?
Also by co-founding a network for womens’ sound locally (for 5 years till Covid), and trying to be connected to people doing experimental music in Paris, here for sure I can tell there are different scenes and collectives and sound-systems and homemade acousmoniums even - now we have a new vivid generation coming in that I’m also connected to.
Otherwise I can be a bit more of a loner. I made choices in my life to realise my dream like quitting the film environment (or industry), no way i’ll get imprisoned in a scene and its codes. But true, we can be lonely with our practice sometimes. One person who really connected us was Phill Niblock, whenever he came to Paris or any town, he would invite artists and musicians to come to gatherings he would organise. That's the way they would get to communicate.
Other than that it’s mostly around concerts that we meet. There are some regular series, I will do one next week called Le Non Jazz.
But I don’t know, if I’m quite sincere with you, because I think my style is not… very much French! I know that now people work a lot of with field recordings but coming with a background in dance culture not sure, this style is more common now : you have rhythmic noise, it’s called, the genre.
AC: …do you relate to that?
Gaël Segalen: …yes and no. Not. DFR again is what has been defined as my style a while ago.
I also do more improvisation today, bringing in objects, something else quite shared and common. And I think it’s also good to be listened to by many people living abroad. This is a way to send a bottle in the ocean for a reception somewhere, in a geographical point you wouldn’t expect.
When I notice a cliquish environment, too, it can make me really dizzy, uncomfortable. That community, that scene, I don’t know if it just exists in my mind. We need genuine care. We are all concerned.
My masters thesis was about a band in music, what it was to be a band. …to be mad, together. And how the identity of the group would drive some of the members to be… mean, you know, edgelords of some sort. Pretending that we are cool to be so mad, ferocious. This is something I wrote about, the madness (la folie) in music. But not through history - it was a monographie, I picked a band I knew.
I defended my subject.
I have this tendency in observing the way people act. And the law of the group.
AC: Well I guess that’s your sociology background.
Gaël Segalen: Yes that’s right. I have this eye for that. I’m sensitive to interactions of course very much, I suffer from my empathy but I don’t want to be confrontational, or isolated. It’s not that I’m an antisocial person. I search for fairness.
I didn’t have mentors for instance, didn’t go to art school so my influences came from digging, listening, from things I was discovering. For instance Pauline Oliveros, the distinction she makes between listening and hearing. I came upon this subject later on, after I already had decided I would call my practice ‘IHearU’, which was all about saying: I hear you, I understand, what if you’re voiceless, and so on. It’s from a social background. I worked with people who were quite invisible. The sense that I could offer that amplifier.
I do less social work, I focus on my music.
…you know, I say that it is not very French because of the many influences in music I received, but I’ve studied electroacoustic with a woman composer called Christine Groult. She’s retired now from teaching, and can be fully dedicated to composing. She had a duo with Beatriz Ferreyra.
AC: …I just had a moment because I couldn’t remember where I knew the name Christine Groult from. Beatriz Ferreyra was the one who mentioned her to me.
Gaël Segalen: Yes I’ve seen the interview. She actually added a dedication on her album to Christine Groult. So I studied with her, and from that class I do have techniques from the French electroacoustic method and school.
Also I don’t know if you know Jean-Claude Éloy, a “compositeur-voyageur”. He died recently. He was close to Stockhausen, worked in Japan and had used lots of sound from there but not in an exotic way. He said he practices auditory drowning and operating long metamorphosis combining antagonistic sources, contradictory energies, which I defend in my own music. It’s complex, physical, trippy, can last hours. He was working with electronic masses or clusters, as I like to do also - “continuum flux”, but not drone, more like Bruitism. “Bruit” which in French is noise. Music made of noises, like the Futurists.
AC: Ok. Like Russolo…
Gaël Segalen: Yes not like the rumor of war but noises as acceptance of diversity and variety in intensity and nature and semantics, yes in the tentative to embrace all of what forms the symphony of noises-machines, the sounds of life, forming a new musical alphabet and giving new kind of musical emotion, the opened listening to the world around us. Inouï (extraordinary, unheard)
…or you know, Walter Ruttmann “Weekend”, cinema for the ears.
Gaël Segalen: Yes.
…I’m dropping some names here. I guess when people ask what are your references… I have so many!
AC: I know… whatever drifts in!
Any current or upcoming projects that you’d like us to know about, or any other parting thoughts for our readers?
Gaël Segalen: Recently I released an album which is a live gig, on an English record label Chocolate Monk. I was invited by Dylan Nyoukis to release something, and I sent something really personal which was based on the generational topic, ancestors, and saving the furniture from a sold family house in Béarn, saving the life of my father who had a severe accident in making the move, and being surrounded by wild nature. It’s a record that has as many figures as a committee of vultures negotiating a carcass. It’s about life. My son is on the cover.
Lately I want to go back to field recording, because this is something I left behind a bit. I’ve been reintroducing sounds of animals or animality, very raw things which I miss sometimes because I’ve been into technology and metamorphosis and tools we use to transform sounds. I want to be back into some sources, some objects I can manipulate. Get back into something less mysterious? simple? I don’t know. Seems I was almost back on the adventure, planning to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan in April for the Space21 sound art festival, but war has decided differently, all thoughts to the people suffering, killed and displaced in the whole region.
I’m split between being very sincere, and having the tools in my hands to manipulate with the magical art of sound. Transparency, iIllusions. I want to use that in a quite ethical way.
For sure I want to explore voice because I had surgery on my thyroid a few years ago and I lost my voice for five months. I had vocal paralysis. Then I did reeducation and I want to use my voice more fully and more playfully. I speak louder now.
Right now I’ve entered a studio for a few months, I’m subletting a place. I asked a young woman, a cello player and singer, to come into the studio to improvise together. We’re preparing a project that I like very much. It’s not that frequent that I work in sound with a woman actually. And more collabs with women are coming including with a visual artist.
I’ve been asked since before ‘SOFIA’, since ‘L’Ange le Sage’, by proper musicians that I compose for them, or in the process together. For some reason I was never ready, or bold enough because it’s very much through aurality that I work. I don’t write music, and I don’t draw music. But that’s coming. I did with two choirs yet though.
When I first started, I was so precious with the sound materials I had. I was recording the sound of the world, everything. There was a time when I was working on radio with analogue tape. I’d cut a tiny piece of it and I’d say: where has it gone? Is it on the floor? When you start, you’re so cautious and reverential about the material you have - you’re afraid of expressing yourself by interpreting reality.
It’s always something about the way you consider what you have in your hands. And access to. Do you have to destroy it totally, or how do you translate it, in what respect? What are your ethics?
For instance we talk about ethics with sound extractivism. There are a lot of things in our day which are about sound “hunting”. …and this is being questioned now with the iconography of the chase, the predator. How much do you have to record, how much do you have to extract, how much data, how much do I have to produce, buy as gear? And show the process and accident ?
In my case I love working with limitations, exploring one file, one sound and bringing it somewhere in many ways. Or pairing 2 sounds only together, might be some surprise.
AC: There’ll be something wonderful coming out of that, the way that you’re thinking.
Thanks for the discussion.
Gaël Segalen: Thank you.
Gaël can be found on http://ihearu.org/ and on Bandcamp.
Images
All images by Gaël Segalen/uncredited except where indicated.
0) Album sleeve by Coherent States.
1) Image by Edouard Sufrin (live at Instants Chavirés).
3) Image by Musica Dispersa (live at New River Studios).
4) Album sleeve by Coherent States.
8) Image by Isabelle Rabaud and Gaël Segalen.
9) Image by Isabelle Rabaud and Gaël Segalen.
