Luc Ferrari PRESQUE RIEN n.1 - le lever du jour au bord de la mer

The recordings for Presque rien no. 1 were made during the summer of

1968, in the town of Vela Luka on the isle of Korcula, in what was then

Yugoslavia (now Croatia). Ferrari had travelled there that August to

participate in an arts festival, and was particularly impressed by the

stillness that fell over the village at night: “It was very quiet. At night

the silence woke me up—that silence we forget when we live in a city.

I heard this silence which, little by little, began to be embellished. . . . It

was amazing.” Inspired, Ferrari began making recordings of the hours

just before dawn. After accumulating a number of these tapes, he

noticed certain events that would recur from morning to morning—“

the first fisherman passing by same time every day with his bicycle, the

first hen, the first donkey, and then the lorry which left at 6 a.m. to the

port to pick up people arriving on the boat. Events determined by

society.” From the material he had collected, Ferrari pieced together

over the next few years a sonic representation of a typical morning in

Vela Luka, completing it in 1970. In his interviews with Pauli, Ferrari

describes Presque rien as inaugurating a new genre, although he is quick

to deny its status as a “ work”; rather, Ferrari explains that

these things, which I call “The Presque Riens” because they are lacking

development and completely static, because really almost nothing happens

musically, are more reproductions than productions: electro-acoustic nature

photographs—a beach landscape in the morning mists, a winter day in

the mountaintops.

He continues by stating that one can play these recordings in one’s

apartment or house, “just as one might hang photos or pictures on the

The Politics of Presque rien wall.” Uncannily prefiguring the ambient

nature recordings that would meet with commercial success in the 1990s,

Ferrari’s comments suggest that Presque rien no. 1 was not to be listened to

as much as heard, used to colour or to decorate an interior space.