Stay Still by ERELL LATIMIER

Fiction, Frictions, Frisson

A sociolinguist, composer, and writer, Erell Latimier explores the aesthetic, poetic, and political dimensions of language, with a particular focus on speech. In her compositional work, she engages in an infinitely precise process of setting her writings to sound, concentrating on the interaction between fragments of her texts—interpreted by voices—and sounds, whether collected or created, which are assembled into rich and shadowy semantic echoes. These disrupted discourses function as ghostly perspectives, distanced from the narrative or from inner monologues.
Through these two pieces of concrete fiction, Erell Latimier's voice reveals glimpses of tragic destinies, resonating with alienation, confinement, suffering, resignation, abandonment, and death. The outbursts of psychological violence and images of abused or lifeless bodies, as evoked by the narrator, find immediate resonance in the organic distortions, funereal refrains, and spectral incantations. When intelligibility fades, it gives way to an abstract darkness that speaks to all our senses, bordering on the visceral shiver.
Fueled by the frictions and collisions between characters and the sonic embodiments that crush, swallow, and regurgitate them, the narrative takes shape and meaning through its very deconstruction—sometimes challenging the reliability of the narrators themselves.
In these compositions, the unique sonic grammar instilled by Erell Latimier generates a profoundly sensitive listening context, where damaged speech, sonic murmurs, and gutted frequencies gradually offer the listener the keys to understanding. Through omissions, jolts, repetitions, verbal interference, and suffocating vortexes, we appropriate these fragments of intimate sonic fictions by projecting our own dramatic sense onto them.
Evoking the most inhabited vocal works of Robert Ashley, the Dadaist Hörspiel experiments of early Nurse With Wound, and the literate dark drones of Golem Mécanique, Erell Latimier’s noir works never lose sight of the text. They transcend and interrogate speech through a profoundly sensitive and moving sonic rendering.

Words by Christophe Taupin