London, 2025

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During this interview, I change seats, place myself in front of another artist and ask him the questions I wish people asked me. Today, I speak to the artistic duo behind Korf ar son, a multi-medium project blending sights and sounds.

 

Sylvain, Nebel, what is Korf ar son?

 

Sylvain: Korf ar son is a collaborative Sound-based art project led by pianist Nebel Lang and myself as the graphic half of it. In Breton language, “korf ar son" means the body of sound and proposes to link piano improvisations to their graphic transcriptions by relying on the time of the sound, the attention paid to the notes played, but also to the silences and resonances that constitute it

 

How did the two of you start collaborating together?

 

Sylvain: It is a rather unusual story that has not been talked about much so far. Back in 2016, I remember receiving a curious link to a web page, MINUI, inviting me to download a piano improvisation as a support for a possible connection through a visual video work. At the time I did not even know who was talking to me, the aim being to communicate solely through music and images. It was Nebel Lang who had found me. He has a real gift for feeling things, and making them happen in unexpected ways. He was right and extracted me from my solitary nature in the most beautiful way. Nebel Lang loves collaborating with others, discovering new paths, it is all part of the experience of being alive, and encounters are part of that. A video called “Eskern” was made which gave rise to the desire for a more accomplished project: Korf ar son.

 

Run us through the development of a project.

 

Sylvain: The project began in 2019 and took almost two years to develop before its official publication. Most of the piano improvisations had already been recorded, but all the graphics had yet to be defined. The final visual aspect, the drawings process, the printing work, the choice of materials etc.We started the project with three people, one of whom was supposed to manage the final printing stage. In the end, we realised that it would be best if I managed printing myself, because of the amount of time we had to devote to it. This was followed by a long period of communication between Germany and France to work out the details by email which did not make things easy. In the end, you could say that this project is totally unnatural in a society where everything has to move fast.Its release is a miracle of perseverance and patience, and I truly believe that many people would have probably gone mad after the first six months!

 

Nebel, how do you approach the improvisation part?

 

Nebel: Improvisation is essential for me, it is what gives it that touch of spontaneity. In Korf ar son, the process is the same, it is a kind of constant dialogue between what sounds from the piano and what I play, which although it may seem a redundancy, is not the same thing. There are sounds beyond the pure notes of a series of strings. Depending on how the piano sounds, what I get back from it, I interact with it, that is what I call a dialogue with the instrument. An extra and particular detail that Korf ar son has is that the improvisations are done on a piano freshly tuned by me. After trying out the tuning I am satisfied with, I record a first improvisation on it. The tunings I do are not all the same, and that also gives me the impulse to choose some notes over others.

 

What about you Sylvain, how do you then develop the visual side of the project?

 

From the beginning, I wanted to achieve more than just an abstract representation of the music, my aim was to define a coherent process for representing what I was hearing. The drawing had to strike a balance between two very different approaches. There was both a need to rely on a defined, mastered process to be consistent with the perception of music, but also to leave room for something uncertain to echo its improvised nature, walk on a fragile line where everything can collapse at any moment. In order to make music and image inseparable, the structure of each drawing was obtained by the materialisation of a time line representing a sequence of approximately one minute extracted from the track. The alternation of silences, resonances, and clearly heard sounds determined the visual composition of each central part of the drawings, which then contained the rhythmic signature of the improvisation. Beyond the initial drawing work, the final result being destined to take the form of numbered art prints, this project also gave rise to an important process of printing and transformation that brought to light other possible paths by combining the original drawings with computer-generated images from them. Thus, these experiments also led to a set of printed studies that echo the original drawings and mirror them by dissecting the original image.

 

Tell us about some of the influences that have led you to creating Korf ar son.

 

Nebel: As mentioned above Korf ar son is partly an evolution of the collaboration we started for MINUI, in 2016, where we saw that the interplay between sound and visuals had a rhythm of its own. After a long bike trip across France, I was able to meet Sylvain, and that gave us the confidence to put in more energy and develop something special.

 

What do you envision the future of Korf ar son to be?

 

Nebel: I think we would like the project to spread a bit more among the listeners, to be known, without the need to change its form or concept, and to keep tuning pianos at its own pace. We are also trying to show the work in the format of an exhibition or installation.

 

Sylvain: The Korf ar son project is still very much under the radar despite a warm welcome. There is a lot of confusion about its hybrid nature. I mean, some people are interested in the music, others in the visuals, but a lot of people miss out on the deep connection between the two. The project is aimed as much at music lovers as art collectors, which in a way limits the audience to very specific people. I agree with Nebel, the project would certainly benefit from being presented in the form of exhibitions, which would make the point more obvious.

 

Thanks very much Sylvain and Nebel. One last for the road — one book, one album, one film —, tell us about your latest cultural discoveries?

 

Sylvain: Oh, an anecdote comes to mind. I was recently listening to Samuel Barber's magnificent “Adagio for Strings” and immediately made the connection with the final scene of David Lynch's Elephant Man, which I saw a long time ago. It is a perfect illustration of how music can evoke an image and vice versa. I wish the same for Korf ar son.

 

Bouncing on Sylvain and Nevel,’s words, Korf ar son is definitely a unique project which I encourage you to discover and experience with both senses engaged and for the pleasure of the mind and soul! Read my review of "Rippen".