PUCE MOMENT
Nicolas Devos & Pénélope Michel

Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel are visual and sound artists, one trained at the Beaux-Arts and the Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains and the other a classically trained cellist, singer and multi-instrumentalist. They founded the experimental electronic group CERCUEIL in 2005, a project with which they toured intensively in France and abroad and became part of the French contemporary music scene.

At the same time, they created PUCE MOMENT, envisaged as a sound research laboratory open to experimentation, to multi-disciplinary encounters and to decompartmentalization. Their work is akin to a fictional ethnology expressed through protean projects and mutant visual, sound and musical creations.

Their music is climatic, often inhabited by a strong emotional power. A procession of harmonic structures organized in a ritual way, sometimes close to trance. It can be written or improvised, vocal or instrumental. The electronic and electroacoustic arrangements summon new spaces and abstract landscapes, which can go from the purest sound to the most raw distortions.

They regularly confront traditional instruments (limonary organs, hurdy-gurdy, koto, pipe organs) or musical genres (lyric opera, Japanese Gagaku) that they appropriate through their creations.

Their sound work emphasizes an active participation of the spectator’s listening, whether it is through the staging, the displacement, the sound immersion or the spatialization of the sound.