Mon Possible

The work of Dominique Petitgand has taken different forms according to its diffusion process: CD editions, sound installations and concerts in the dark.

Dominique Petitgand defines his work as mental landscapes and stories. He develops his work from recordings of words, rests, breathings, sounds and musics that he composes, uses, breaks up and cuts. He makes an inventory of voices, gestures, humours in an obsessional way printed by musicality in order to consider a speech, a sate or a lack. He plays on the articulation of components making mental images appear.

Through his spoken and melodic sound plays, Dominique Petitgand offers an original story who belongs to the auditors.

"Each sound play I have done tells something specific and the shape of each one leads to a specific issue too.
As my work is a mix of art, music, writing, montage and narrative, it is important not to close our multiplicity of receptions.

I do not want to stimulate certain feelings or make the auditors travel.

Travel is a little too jolly. What I offer can sometimes be quite brutal or demanding, it is certainly not a calm walk. Talking of a calm walk, I was rather looking for the contrary and the auditors' reflection. I wanted them to be disturbed and affected.
But each of them differently must find the words to match their feelings and their reflections and to find their own context. I explain myself: I want to offer the most bare, neutral, out of any context and time thing (out of any individual, social, geographical, historical or current events references) so the auditor can fill with his own means (spirit, memory and own life experience) the blanks, the rests, the holes in my stories.
Sometimes rests are useful, they allow the auditor to think about what he has just heard, they often have an ambiguous status (is it the person who has shut up or is the play finished?), they give a context to the diffusion (you can hear the place in these blanks), they can at last draw the face of fear (the voice stops, it is cut off).
I want the auditor to think every second about what he is listening to.
A never-ending tension.
Sometimes melodies (that I call musical atmospheres more than melodies because they often are flat and straight forward) play a dramatic role, they can be rests, tensions, counterpoints, impulses or guides for voices, and play on the auditors' sensibility.
The diffusions that I offer is a mix of old and recent plays, in a thematic order, there is a line which goes from one play to the next one, but this line is suggested and hidden."

The new record by Dominique Petitgand, Mon possible, gathers sound and musical pieces created between 2001 et 2010.
Still composed of voices, words, noises, musical atmospheres and silences, the stories here get more enigmatic than on the previous records (Le sens de la mesure, Le point de côté, Le bout de la langue, also released by Ici, d’ailleurs…).

The music, interpreted and composed by Dominique Petitgand (recorded with the sometimes subliminal of some accomplices : Marc Sens, Dominique A, Antoine Carolus, Hervé Birolini, Christine Ott, F.Lor, Yann Tiersen), are minimalistic, often electric, stricken with noises and silences.