Sur la jetée is a sound work drawing inspiration from Chris Marker’s La jetée (The Jetty), the 1962 “experimental” film that also inspired the movies 12 Monkeys by Terry Gilliam and Profondo rosso by Dario Argento. It is a sonic epic to be composed live following a preset sonic canvas. Sound clips from the three aforementioned movies are edited together to make an explicit non-narrative story referencing the literary and sonic composition process known as the cut-up. Of course, the piece is inspired by the mood of Marker’s film, which tells of “a nuclear disaster that erased human life from the face of the earth. Paris is destroyed, and the only survivors are men living underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. The ‘winners’ of this nuclear war are looking for a way to save the human race. They experiment with time travel, trying to send prisonners to a different era.” [Source: Court-circuit #217, 2008 (free translation)]

— Érick d’Orion [English translation: François Couture, x-09]

Premiere

• November 21, 2009, Akousma (6): Éclats d’écrans, Studio Hydro-Québec — Monument-National, Montréal (Québec)