Vocalist, composer, conductor of contemporary music, Ellinoa is back with an ambitious, exciting and poetic new album, total city, which she recorded with her large ensemble Wanderlust Orchestra. Total city is both a philosophical tale and a dystopia for which the composer is alternately singer and storyteller. In this ecological fable, the inhabitants of the “total city” gradually emerge from their confinement and their amnesia thanks to a breakthrough of nature in the concrete… Ellinoa co-signs the texts with Christelle Bakhache, whom she knew in her years of study and who works on the cohabitation between Man and nature in the Alps. Total city is more than a musical concept album. It was designed to be played on stage in 3D sound and will also be the subject of a video game. This new repertoire is presented in Paris on November 9 at the Café de la Danse (without 3D this time).
Released on October 21, 2022 on the label Les P’tits Cailloux du Chemin, Total city is the second album recorded with the Wanderlust Orchestra that Ellinoa formed at the end of 2014. In addition to this formation of fifteen musicians, Ellinoa, 34, whose real name is Camille Durand, leads various projects simultaneously. His last disc as a leader, recorded at the head of a quartet, was the splendid and bewitching The Ballad of Ophelia. In recent years, Ellinoa has worked extensively with the National Jazz Orchestra (ONJ) as a composer-soloist (for Rituals) or simply soloist (for Anna Livia Plurabelle by André Hodeir). Creative, adventurous and eclectic as an artist, she is also very committed to defending improvised music orchestras, as vice-president of the Grands Formats association, which brings together around a hundred groups. While waiting for her Parisian concert, she presents her new project to Franceinfo Culture.
Franceinfo Culture: The city and the ecological question are the two themes brought together in the dystopia at the center of your new artistic project. What path led you to write around these questions? Is this a project that you had in mind for a long time?
Ellinoa: Yes. The previous album, Ophelia, had a theme inscribed in a long, recurring history in art. This time, I wanted to deal with a topic that is more topical, especially since in our everyday lives, this question is present at every moment and in everything we read, in everything we ‘we see, in what we observe and what we think… And I think it’s also part of our responsibility as artists to capture these subjects, in our own way. So there is both this kind of perpetual questioning and something specific to my generation. We are stuck between the generation above which, somewhere, has perhaps somewhat abandoned the idea that it had a card to play in the climate crisis, and the generation below which has always lived with this question. and who is perhaps more prepared. We in our thirties feel that we are partly responsible, that we have a key role and that we absolutely have to do something. All this made me think a lot, especially at a time when many of my relatives are starting to have children. Parallel to this personal reflection, I was reading The Stealthy de Damasio, a book in which there is both the dystopian aspect and the militant side, with the uprising of people against institutions. Total city deals with both ecology and how we have a role to play. I’m not talking specifically about the climate crisis, but there is an ecological fable side treated in my somewhat roundabout way.
Among other influences in the progress of this project, you also like to mention the trilogy Matrix…
The influence is on two levels. First, there is the message delivered by Matrix from a philosophical point of view. There is a whole game about the perception of reality in this trilogy. This has a link with the project of a 3D sound device for the show Total city : the public sees an orchestra playing in front of him, he will see a flute but he will hear it in a place other than where it is actually. So from an almost psychoacoustic point of view, it’s complicated. When you’re not used to that, it’s hard to accept a dissonance between what you hear and what you see. It breaks the codes by which music has operated for years. Asking the public to ignore that is like asking him to take the blue pill offered to Neo, the hero of The Matrix! In Total city there is also this choice to remain in ignorance or to wake up, with the consequences that this generates because our life will change. At the same time, we deliver a political message, of awakening consciences, and there is a philosophical ambiguity which is interesting.
The second thing about Matrix, it’s also that it seems to me that it was the first cinematic trilogy, or the first film, that gave rise to what was called transmedia, even if certain things already existed in other forms of art. With Matrix, it was taken to another level where you have a whole universe. There was a story with a film, then a trilogy, then a video game, then mangas, books… And above all, this universe was developed in other places. Other authors were able to continue the story, invent others, with other means of expression, animation, a series, Animatrix. The first movie Matrix was released in 1999. It was then something very important for me, to adhere to a fictional universe and to need to develop it as if I were living in it. This world was a game, I wanted to draw pictures, write stories, use means within my reach as a teenager, to connect as much as possible with this universe. I spent a lot of time there when I was growing up. There was a bit of this idea in the project Total city. I posed a universe, I told a story, but I want this story to be developed in other media as well, including music videos.
As you mentioned, the project Total city is theoretically designed to be played on stage in 3D sound. How does it work?
This was developed using software, Spat Révolution, developed in Orléans, the city where my sound engineer Terence Briand is also from. This software was designed starting from a reverb [réverbération] developed by IRCAM [Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique]. So initially, IRCAM did research on a reverb that can simulate space, the remote side, proximity… When a sound is played right next to us, and then it s away, there are a whole host of things that will distort this sound, such as the density of the air… If the ear perceives that a sound is very far or close, it is because it interprets the transformation undergone by the sound before reaching it. Ircam has developed a kind of acoustic sphere where you can position a sound anywhere. A speaker may be next to you and sending you a certain type of sound. And your brain will think that the sound is not there at all. The software is the operational part. It allows you to place all the sound sources one by one, for example from the Wanderlust Orchestra, the flute, the drums, the English horn, and to position them in space. Then, to manage the move. It will make calculations in relation to this reverb and in relation to what it must send to the speakers. When you’re in the middle of it all, it seems like the sound is moving. Unfortunately, we cannot activate this device this Wednesday at the Café de la Danse: we would have had to rent the room for an additional day, which was not possible.
While waiting for you to be able to present the whole of this show, you have also declined Total city in video games… Explain to us.
It will be ready in the next few days. I was still working on it during a tour with the NYO on the plane a few days ago. This game won’t be released because I didn’t want people to pay to play it, I’m not a professional video game developer. We did it together. Arthur Henn, who plays the double bass in Wanderlust, was my musical assistant, when we made the sounds and the music which are transpositions into the sounds of old consoles. I did all the graphics, design, etc. And I sent everything to a coder. The game will be available online and downloadable from my site, for free. Later, there will surely be a mobile version.
Ellinoa & Wanderlust live in Paris – Wednesday, November 9, 2022 at the Café de la Danse, 8:00 p.m. – Part 1: The Eyes of Berthe (Loïs Le Van, vocals; Sandrine Marchetti, piano)