Polyphem

This piece of extreme violence, gives its name to the entire project. Polyphem is a medium-range subsonic anti-ship missile (specialized in surgical strikes) and is also the name of the son of Poseidon and the Thoosa nymph, defeated by the ruse of Ulysses, a mythological giant with one eye. Here the percussionist is a kind of missile launcher that deploys a terrible force to attack the public. But this violence will turn against him.

set
1 percussionist and 1 electroacoustic broadcast system

“(…) a” child of war “, for whom creation is” a way to reverse the process of violence by making it no longer undergo it but control it. ” It is precisely the sounds of war that are the basis of his latest work, Polyphem, named after a medium-range subsonic anti-ship missile specialized in surgical strikes. (…)

In this set of nine pieces, Zad Moultaka explores the sensitive worlds, from panic fear to wild utopia. It goes from the memory of a world gone – Another silence, sung in Arabic by the soprano Françoise Kubler on a text of Bab el Chams, Elias Khoury – in the magnificent No, homage to the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, murdered on June 2, 2005 Flamenco dancer Yalda Younes performs a wild zapateado to the sound of a bombardment recorded in Beirut.

Between contemporary Western writing and sensitivity related to Arabic music, Zad Moultaka draws a cosmogony of our time, Azur, room for accordion and tape played by Pascal Contet, An-Nas, chamber music inspired by the last surah of the Koran , “The Men”, performed by the Contemporary Orchestral Ensemble.

Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, November 29, 2007