La Rémanence

La Rémanence — the voice that remains after it has gone — is a six-minute work for voice and electronics in four passages, written in Paris in 2026 for quadraphonic diffusion.

All material is performed voice. No other sound source. Everything heard — including the deepest sub-rumbles and the brightest pitched shards — is the same throat returning, transposed, stretched, dispersed, then permitted to return as itself. The four passages move from breath into dispersion, dispersion into the cluster, and cluster into dissolve. The unprocessed voice arrives only as refrain: first as a single dry phrase in I, again at the centre of III — where a quartal cluster (A3 · D4 · F♯4 · A4 · C♯5 · E5) arrives once and never returns — and one last time as a lone phrase walking diagonally across the room in IV. Four loudspeakers stand at the corners of a square with the listener at the centre; the score shows, above each system, a crimson timeline, the voice line, the energy in each of the four corners, and the active processing.

The voice is what stays. Everything else is its remanence.