French Sound Theorist Michel Chion Announces Auckland Appearance

Renowned sound theorist, composer and author Michel Chion has announced his debut New Zealand appearance. While here Chion, who has penned a number of books on the interaction between sound and film, will deliver a special lecture-performance at Auckland Art Gallery expounding on the phenomenon of the ‘acousmêtre’ – his term for the mysterious off-screen voice in cinema. The following evening, the 70-year-old artist will take up residence in the Auckland Unitarian Church to present his classic work Requiem (1973) alongside his new audiovisual composition Third Symphony (2016) and musique concrète piece The Scream (2017) over an epic two-and-a-half-hour concert for ten surround-speakers. Here are the details...

Michel Chion

Thursday 31 August, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland (lecture performance)
Friday 1st September, Auckland Unitarian Church, Auckland

Tickets to the Friday evening show available HERE at UTR and in-store Flying Out on Pitt Street. Scroll down for more details on the lecture.

Stream the 1993 reissue of to Michel's first studio record Requiem (1928) below...

PRESS RELEASE:

AUDIO FOUNDATION & AUT PRESENTS:
MICHEL CHION (France)


Pioneering composer, filmmaker, historian and writer Michel Chion is one of the world's foremost thinkers on sound in cinema. This spring, Chion is set to visit New Zealand where he will present two very special events. In the 1970s Chion was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the influential collective led by composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer dedicated to furthering the art of ‘musique concrète’ through experiments in audiovisual communication, audible phenomena and music in general.

Lecture Performance:
The Voice in Cinema, or The Acousmêtre and Me
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Wellesley St E, Auckland
Thursday 31 August, 6.00pm
In this specially commissioned lecture-performance, Chion traces a history of the ‘acousmêtre’ – his term for the mysterious off-screen voice in cinema – through his own oeuvre, and the works of Robert Bresson, Fritz Lang, Hans-Jugen Syberberg, Spike Jonze & more.
A Liquid Architecture project in partnership with Audio Foundation, AUT and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Concert:
The Audio-Spectator
Auckland Unitarian Church, 1A Ponsonby Road Auckland
Friday 1 September, 8.00pm
Presale tickets ($25)/ door sales ($30)
Chion presents his classic work Requiem (1973) alongside his new audiovisual composition Third Symphony (2016) and musique concrète piece The Scream (2017) over an epic two-and-a-half-hour concert for ten surround-speakers.
A Liquid Architecture project in partnership with Audio Foundation and AUT.

Since the 1980s, Chion has written extensively on the relationship of sound and image in the cinema, publishing in 1990 what many consider the definitive theoretical guide to the subject, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. In this momentous book, Chion advances a whole new lexicon for describing audio-visual concepts, via the works of Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and others. On reading, film scholar Claudia Gorbman was moved to name him "a poet in theoretician's clothing."

Chion's tour to Australia and New Zealand is an historic and unlikely to be repeated occasion. It is made possible by the generous support of Institut Français, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, AUT, the Audio Foundation, Creative New Zealand and Liquid Architecture.