Yann Paranthoën
L'art de la radio
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Add rightsFormat Book, CD, DVD
Year 2009
Pages 156 pages
Running time DVD 110 min, CD 50 min
Artist(s) Yann Paranthoën
Publisher Phonurgia Nova Editions
Description
Yann Paranthoën? His name symbolizes art radio (as one speaks of art cinema or art photography). He discovered a way of narrating the world through sound, inventing a language and completely renewing the foundations of radio expression. In his broadcasts, speech is a material to be sculpted, on the same level as the sounds of life or silences. Likewise, for him, the voice is first and foremost music before being meaning. By demystifying both writing and image, he changed the order of things and renewed our relationship to reality. Taking his distance from "everyday radio," he readily compared his work to painting or even to granite cutting as his father practiced it: extracting from reality a sonic block, assembling it as one cuts stone, polishing it as one mixes. Here is how he spoke of it: "I compare radio with painting. For me, radio has more and more to do with the plastic arts. I make a painting... a sonic painting, I distribute sounds like colors."
His death in 2005 was perceived as symbolically attesting to the fading of a certain form of "creative radio" in its most demanding expression. That is why it was urgent to pay tribute to him, so that his work might continue its path toward new listeners, encouraging them to prefer to conventional radio the sovereign freedom of sound art.