The Ictus Liquid Room reinvents the format of the classical concert. Several stages, abrupt transitions, amplification and careful lighting in a loft atmosphere… The spectator is given a small cardboard stool with which he is free to move around in the space, to choose where he wants to listen from, to come and go. The concert is long, the bar is open: it's a festival in miniature. This format encourages numerous ways of listening, from listening “attentively” to “immersive” listening; and back and forth.

The sound of a match struck in the night, is amplified a thousand times. The twilight transforms the way we listen to the recent repertoire; Sciarrino, Pesson and Bedrossian. An installation by Alvin Lucier — a guitar string with the dimensions of a boat mooring line — is superimposed on James Tenney’s exploration of tam-tam resonances. Ula Sickle and Yann Leguay work the sound and light stroboscopy. Sound & Vision: in almost three hours, this multi-concert will investigate the intersections between music and visual performance. This is undoubtedly the preoccupation of an entire generation of young people, for whom the musical moves between the eye and the ear.

The central issue will be the presence of the body of musicians and the new alliances which are formed between it and the machines. The sequencing of the light, for example, becomes a parameter like any other of the score, for composers who have been brought up on domestic IT. Others push the computer, the video, microphony to its limits and introduce subversion and irony to a digital world which no longer intimidates anyone. In this way a non-servile relationship with the machine is hesitantly built up, in which the musician recovers his rights and his physical ease.