For the 2017 edition of Balades Sonores in Besançon, Pierre-Laurent Cassière produced four pieces, included in his Absences series. This project, carried out since 2012, is an evolving collection of sound creations dedicated to specific spaces, and all designed according to the same protocol. Each is a montage of binaural * recordings, made on site and showing people evoking their memories and their relationship to the place. Each soundtrack can be listened to in situ, placing itself precisely at the location of the recordings that compose it, producing a perceptive experience of disturbing realism. The recorded sounds are difficult to distinguish from the real sound environment while the narration produces the illusion of a physical proximity to the speakers, whose anecdotes gradually modify our relationship to the place. The compositions produced in Besançon offer moments of stop and pay attention to the architectural environment and those who pass through it. For La Bonne Âme (15'10 ''), Claudine Moyse shares the memory of some unexpected encounters, during her days of presence in the chapel of Notre-Dame du Refuge.Place de la Révolution, it is the artist Pierre-Louis Bréchat who recalls his years of teaching at the Beaux-Arts and the events of 1968 in Le Professeur de dessin (13'23 '').
With Le Peintre (10'34 ''), Noël Girard-Clos, known as Guimbarde, tells us, passionately, the musician friends and the hideouts in the small passage towards the Quai Vauban. In the Church of Sainte-Madeleine, finally, no one mentions a memory in Le Prêtre (8'36 '') but we overhear a strange exchange as the organist is doing his scales.
* Specific recording technique based on two omnidirectional microphones placed in the ears of the sound recorder (or on an artificial head) so as to best restore the natural stereophonic perception and thus promote the spatial realism of the recording.
