Roxane Métayer
‘Éclipse des Ocelles’ is the vinyl debut album of French drone folk violin player Roxane Métayer.
“Between the sound of this bird and the sound of the violin”
What kind of record is ‘Éclipse des Ocelles’?
Roxane Métayer: It’s a record of a woodpecker using his beak in order to communicate with others species or dig his nest.
My idea was to create a link between the sound of this bird and the sound of the violin. These sounds bird both from the bouncing of the wood and the strings. The violin becomes a tool which allows me to imitate this particular sound. It turns into a sort of extension of my body. As a new organ, I can communicate with others species with it.
Why are you a violin player?
I still try to remember but I don’t know why precisely I have chosen the violin when I was a child. I like to imagine different reasons. I think I probably had been attracted by it formal aspect: arabesques and volutes of the object, the possibilities of creating swirling sounds with it, and maybe also its link with the wind and with the trees.
Like most musicians, I have a real feeling of an intimate relationship with my violin. It is like it’s almost alive. It has an entity. Besides, in French we call the sound post of the violin, the “soul”. The post of the violin is a dowel inside the instrument under the treble end of the bridge, spanning the space between the top and back plates and held in place by friction. It serves as a structural support for an archtop instrument, transfers sound from the top plate to the back plate and alters the tone of the instrument by changing the vibrational modes of the plates.
Who inspires you?
Meredith Monk inspires me a lot, in her way of using human voice as primitive screams tinted by melodies, and how she uses the environment, spaces to modulate sounds and collectivity to create intense moments of polyphony.
I like the work of Steina and Woody Vasulka because they went through mediums, and have experimented how encounters between technology, the instrument and the body can create a new language. They have transformed the use of the violin as a machine that can generates frames through video and performance, connecting this supposedly classic instrument to a complex narrative system.
More broadly, medieval music as a window of an ancient age. I like when these holes in time appears in a creation.
And Japanese Gagaku as it uses silences as decisive parts of the composition.
“I would like to bring together every medium I use”
Is there a link between your music and your visual art?
My music and my visual art are first linked because they both often evoque fictitious space and time.
My music is also linked to my videos because I use it as a part of their narration. Now I’m working to strengthen the ties more directly, in the idea of performing I would like to bring together every medium I use.
Why did you move from France to Belgium?
Encounters have brought me here. I grow by change. I was feeling that staying in the same place would prevent me to evolve.
Is your music psychedelic?
We can maybe say there is a psychedelic aspect in my music because it helps me to explore parts of myself and to know myself better. Playing music also brings the possibility of creating worlds that can be seen as sounds extensions of the imagination. It has this synesthesic aspect as psychedelics spheres, it transports inside very different dimensions. Its moving aspect actually allows shifts and trips. It enlarges the field of vision, opens and brings to altered states of consciousness.
Is there a link to folk and drone music?
In my practice of music there is also a link with folk music or drone music in the sense that I’m using drones and little fragments of folk, as patterns, as emergencies of a certain type of languages or narrations. But I like that it disappears as it comes, as phantoms or shades. Roxane Métayer
Joeri Bruyninckx
Roxane Métayer Official Website / Facebook / Instagram
Morc Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp
