CEDRIK FERMONT – week eight
Cedrik Fermont is a composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, independent researcher, concert organiser and curator who makes music within the field of electroacoustic, noise, electronic, experimental and improvised music since 1989, born in Zaire (DR Congo), he mostly grew up in Belgium and currently lives in Germany. Through his label, Syrphe, Fermont aims to publish and promote artists from Asia and Africa and at a lower extent, from Latin America, who compose experimental, electronica, noise, ambient, free improv, and industrial music from various artists including himself. Fermont enjoys to travel to different places and see other ways of composing and viewing music so that he can explore different sounds in which he can create new pieces with. His way of creating music is through experimenting, not wanting to ‘systematically copy what other people do and blindly follow trends’. While growing up in Belgium, as a teenager, he realised that he was ‘one of the very few brown kids in the field of industrial, experimental music and punk music and so forth’, and further, wondered why, since having friends ‘from Turkey, North Africa and other parts of the world’ were mostly not interested in that kind of music as he was. Fermont started listening to alternative electronic music in 1986 at 14 years of age, and in 1991 he started a tape label – ‘working like this back then, you had no money and you would do everything by yourself and there was no internet, but there was this wonderful tape network and a network where we could trade, buy and sell cassettes or vinyls’. Though, he wondered why he was getting music mostly from ‘Western Europe, north west of Europe and North America, hardly anywhere else - a bit from Japan, a bit from Australia, and couldn’t get anything from Africa, Latin America, Asia or Eastern Europe’. Not believing that there were no people from these parts of the world interested in this music, Fermont sent out flyers explaining that he was looking for people who were interested in participating in compilations he was creating, being electronic, noise, industrial and experimental artists from other parts of the world. Through this, other artists were able to get back to him, however with the internet not being accessible at this time, it did take a while for him to get responses.
He researched the development of noise music in Asian countries, publishing it in his book ‘Not Your World Music: Noise In South East Asia’, which is a result of years of data collection, meetings, interviews and travelling across South East Asia. ‘Since World War II, South East Asia has experienced tremendous social and political changes. The post-war period from 1945 until the 1970s had also been an extremely creative artistic movement across the world, a time of decolonisation and radical political changes. The struggles between communist and anti-communist factions afflicted the South East Asian region throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s and in a general way dictated how some kinds of music and art would be promoted, tolerated or forbidden – this is one of the main reasons why South East Asia has remained excluded from the experimental music map up until the 1980s-90s, with the notable exception of the Philippines and Indonesia’.
Fermont’s pieces don’t generally have lyrics, and he states that he rarely includes samples in his compositions. They all tend to have a natural and certain environmental sound to them, which range from 1 minute to an hour long. This is because he composes a lot with his own instruments, for example a stone or a piece of metal, since he likes to collect different objects when travelling and incorporates them in his music. Fermont’s work therefore is nostalgic and personal to him, since when he listens back to certain pieces, he remembers where and what was recorded and why he chose to create that certain sound. From being inspired by gamelan music, (said in YouTube video), which is ‘the term for a traditional musical ensemble in Indonesia, typically referring to a percussion orchestra composed predominantly of tuned gongs of various types and metal-keyed instruments’, Fermont has been able to experiment with instruments used in this genre of music, which can be shown in his piece Pt4 with Marie Takahashi, with the use of gongs.
While being open to exploring different sounds, Cedrik Fermont has created a range of different songs, which can fit within genres such as electroacoustic, dark ambient, noise and field recordings as examples. A piece that is said to be a field recording is called ‘Multiples des uns’, ‘which is a mix of various field recordings made between January and June 2014 across Asia. A sort of cinema for the ears made of various soundscapes taken in urban areas, transports, fields, parks, etc.’. This showcases different environments within Asia during the day and night, including the urban atmosphere of Asia with the sounds of transport and the public crowds in addition to natural environments with the sounds of a water stream and animals. While listening to the hour-long audio, us as the listener may feel as if we are experiencing the trip with Fermont. He states that ‘noise pleases his ears and emotionally attracts him, hence it is music to me and it is intentionally produced to be listened to’, which is shown through his different pieces since they all tend to similarly be ‘noise music’ that don’t tend to have a specific structure or repeating melody line.
https://passiveaggressive.dk/not-your-world-music-noise-in-south-east-asia-artist-talk-with-cedrik-fermont/
https://www.academia.edu/28486430/History_of_noise_music_in_South_East_Asia_chap_4_Cedrik_Fermont
https://syrphe.bandcamp.com/album/multiples-des-uns
https://syrphe.bandcamp.com/music –lists ‘electronica, noise, experimental music from Asia, Africa and other continents from various artists’, including Cedrik Fermont