ALWAYS SLIGHTLY
DEAF...
Here lays Soundtracks For The Blind. By giving this issue the title of an album by the Swans, Pierre Beloüin pays a discreet tribute to the dark universe of Michael Gira, always slightly deaf, always slightly blind, disabled, skinned. But he also pays tribute to music and sound as major inspirational sources. Besides, nothing is more ancient than the idea of collaboration between the arts, the rule of correspondence and of secret exchange between senses.
 
But Pierre Beloüin stays at a distance (and even very far away) from any Baudelairian – or pop – sensuality: here, he is offering a voluntarily deceptive soundtrack, as it remains silent, made of images. That is because if he always tried to reproduce the incredible producing power of sound and music, he literally understands exchange between all arts as a collective work between artists, graphic designers, musicians, and writers. As a visual artist, and publisher for over ten years (the Optical Sound label, Pin-Up Badges), One-Man Band Pierre Beloüin today logically offers a new glimpse at his strong taste for collaborations, with this silent association of people, mental universe, ideas, and images. Necessarily dissonant, this collective production is made of singular approaches, as musical tastes can be: images of live happiness (Eddie Ladoire, Frédéric Post), black and white nostalgia (Claude Lévêque, Léo Carbonnier), musical abstractions (Pierre Beloüin, Digital Baobab), or collage (Loig, Goran Vejvoda).
 
How can sound be made out of visual material? With images? With words? Rhythmic compositions by Kandinsky, those by Klee, film experiments by the Whitney brothers, tech abstractions by Stéphane Dafflon, Steven Parrino’s necrophilic monochromes, or the Mallarmean Album, were proposals.
Now listen to the answer of the Beloüin crew.