Age of Heroes

East of Skopje there is a small quiet square where you can sometimes hear the trace of orchestral music. These sounds lead you into a large studio where about a hundred people daily record music for films from all over the world.

Continuing his exploration of the relationships between different listening practices that a priori have no connection (amateur radio, listening to birds, detecting ghosts), and which led to the production of films, performances and creations for radio (Diana, 2014-2017), here, Simon Ripoll-Hurier takes an interest in the Film And Music Ensemble in Skopje in North Macedonia, a studio specialised in recording film music – yet another example of strategies to relocate production sites. Or rather, his interest focuses on the richly equipped studio connected via videoconferencing to composers worldwide and situated in an unremarkable dilapidated square in the Balkans; and on the editing possibilities offered by their proximity. While, inside, there reigns the strenuous effervescence of some hundred musicians and sound engineers working on the making of original sound tracks in diverse styles, the immediate surroundings of the building are steeped in an indolent peacefulness – children pass by on their tricycles and a few dogs stretch out on its cracked concrete paving. In a place where language is limited to a few simple technical notations quickly interrupted, when language does not lose itself in its phatic function or dies out in the distance, music casts rich emotional colours onto this place without qualities. And the permutations that ordinarily govern the relationships between the image and orchestral music pierce this dull and prosaic burlesque with moving flashes of beauty.

Antoine Thirion