Michel Risse : Revealing the Soundscape of New York

New York is a sonorous city, one could even say that it is a city that has a taste for noise. It draws much of its energy from this, a vitality that soundscape artist Michel Risse and his company Décor Sonore came to explore during their residency at Villa Albertine. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, author and electroacoustician, Michel Risse studied music and percussion, which he practiced in numerous rock and jazz bands. In 1972, he began to develop an interest in sound creation in free-space, and to compose his first “sound decors”. His encounter in New York with the sound painting collective Strike Anywhere gave rise to various experiments in Battery Park and elsewhere… The opportunity to define this function of sound landscaper that Michel Risse has been cultivating for 50 years, in the wake of composer John Cage who declared: “I have never listened to a sound without appreciating it. The only problem with sounds is music.