Like Flesh • Éditorial de Maxime Pascal
Sensitivity to the phenomenon of sound is at the heart of Sivan Eldar's music. Coupled with Cordelia Lynn's libretto, which tells the supernatural story of a woman who transforms herself into a tree for love, this sensitivity creates a very finely articulated composition of instrumental and electronic timbres. The music of Like Flesh concentrates many natural elements, such as the proliferation of plants, networked roots, and the way all flora communicate. Certain sounds duplicate themselves like cells reproduce. We are familiar with the music of humans, and this opera allows us to imagine what the music of the plant world would be like, and thus to open our perception of sound. At the Lille Opera, a network of speakers placed on the ground extended this natural composition to the diffusion of sound. The recording we hear here follows this all-encompassing principle, immersing us within the forest-sound.
This era is full of questions about our environment, about animals, and about plants. There is distress, anxiety, but also great discoveries that lead us to a better and better understanding of the world around us: the connections between trees, the song of whales, the way ants communicate. Like Flesh is one of the first works to take these new realities into account; imagining a poetics of curiosity, sensual and tragic.