Repulsion/Attraction

Repulsion/Attraction was composed jointly with the saxophonist and composer Tristan Michelin for the two of us to perform — voice, saxophone and electronics — and premiered on 8 June 2026 at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg, on the same evening as The Ceremony of Almost Saying.

The slash in the title is the piece. Two bodies on a stage, two instruments that share almost nothing — a reed column and a throat — and a single electronic space between them that pushes them apart and pulls them together in turn. We wrote it as a real duet, each composing for the other: Tristan set the rules for my voice, I set them for his saxophone, and the electronics were built so that whatever one of us does is immediately reflected, inverted, in the other’s sound. Repulsion is the section where the two refuse to touch — the saxophone in its highest, thinnest register, the voice in its lowest, everything processed to keep them apart; attraction is where they are made to converge on a single pitch and held there, beating, until one of them gives way.

The piece alternates the two states faster and faster until, in the last minute, they are the same thing.