À VIF – String Quartet No.1 explores a fragile territory where flesh—sometimes gently grazed, sometimes violently attacked—is laid bare in all its tension, oscillating between dissolution and brutality. This balance between two extremes resonates with the legacy of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. Its traces, decomposed and filtered through memory, do not seek to appear as explicit quotations, but rather as suspended shadows—settling onto every element of the work like a fine layer of dust accumulated by time on the furniture of a sealed room.
The atmosphere of À VIF is that of a threshold: a space where memory and forgetting coexist, where blood and breath are in dialogue. Sonic particles scatter within it—ephemeral—creating fleeting spaces that form and disintegrate in an instant, as if attempting, through a chance combination, the genesis of flesh.
At the heart of the work lies a relentless struggle between the material and the immaterial, the body and the void. Every sound, every gesture hesitates between solidity and dissolution—coexisting in an apparent fragility, yet traversed by irrepressible internal forces.
This unstable, highly charged equilibrium gradually intensifies, until it erupts in an explosive discharge where body and sound clash in brutal collision. Violence then emerges as a cry—a shock in which the boundary between flesh and breath vanishes, revealing the contained energy saturating the sonic space.
This piece does not narrate; it observes. It scrutinizes the tension between resistance and surrender, between construction and disintegration.
A sound space where the past settles silently upon the present, and where the air becomes the sole witness to this soft intrusion—until matter suddenly reclaims its place in a raw cry, where flesh returns as presence: powerful and irreducible.
