Awaiting (Diffuse Reality Records)

The new CD album of Nicolas Tourney, "Awaiting", will be released at Diffuse Reality Records on April 21, 2021.

Q: How do you define your approach to sound and music? 

NT: Although it is fundamentally linked to perceptions and the fact of perceiving, music is most often the place of expression and projection of affects. All my work consists of starting again from this place between sound and perception, not necessarily to look for acoustic illusions, but to lead the listener to an experience which, at times, goes beyond the musical field strictly speaking. What is the difference between noise and sound? Why when I listen am I drawn into a series of mental comments? What is a just intonation? What is pure perception? How to convey the notions of resonance and musical space?

Q: How do you relate to drone music? 

NT: A constant sound is called a drone. And my approach is defined as belonging to drone music, without perceiving the multiplicity of changes, often microscopic, which are in it. I prefer to use the notion of "sound substrate", from which music appears that provokes a contemplative or experiential openness in the listener.

Q: What is your intention? 

NT: A musical research that is both witness to a practice, as well as a collection of attempts to break through the sound barrier. There is an extremely long road to re-establish the noise, and inhabit it.

You can read below a review written by Erick Gasca, and published in Club Furies (April 2021):

"Nicolas Tourney is a French experimental musician, sound designer and owner of the Snow in Water Records label. His electronic works refer to perception and the act of listening, with the use of various strings, drones and devices that make noise.

Diffuse Reality Records' Teorema label presents his fourteen-track work titled Awaiting, in what appears to be a mind-blowing journey through the sound of the French producer on the Argentine-Spanish label.

The entire album is coming, and Club Furies presents the premiere of the penultimate track Resolve Paradoxes, which in part refers to a subject that we are particularly passionate about: paradoxes.

The paradoxes, says Luhmann, are formulations that do not affirm anything, because there is nothing that corresponds to them, and from Nietzsche and Heidegger, until arriving at Derrida, the paradoxes are not avoided or annulled but rather put in evidence. They are passionately celebrated; but before they were avoided seeing, like Stenos, one of the Gorgons.

So let's play. Resolve Paradoxes appears wrapped in that halo that covers that part of Homer's Odyssey in which the ship meets the Gorgons and to avoid looking at them the captain asks the helpers to tie him up as he passes by: will he avoid looking at them or will he succumb to its magic?

The anguish and stress that is woven into that image has its sound correlate in this track, which is paradoxically called Resolve Paradoxes, which, as in the history of the thought of the concept of paradox, in Ancient Greece was ignored because it petrified the thought, and in modern and contemporary thought they are celebrated, on this track we find the following dilemma, which starts from that dichotomy: to see or not to see the Gorgons, while the track flies over and crosses the entire scene.

An extraordinary combination."