Interview with Florence Cats
1. There is a moment in life for every artist and musician to get inspired and move on towards a certain
direction and commit to start doing what is closer to your interest?
You also have been through different stages in your life related to different genres. Can you describe this (those) moment(s)?
In my early twenties, I was very shy, wild and angry...so much rage.... a wound, a loss, screaming in me. I sang, shouted or spoken word my texts with punk bands, living in squats and hanging out on the streets, filming, recording. I looked very young and desperate. Once the cops arrested me, thinking I was running away, another time I spent a few days in a German jail after a protest. Life changed when I found a baby cat, Pia, and traveled with her, hitchhiking, until she didn’t fit under my hoodie to go to punk gigs and supermarkets. So I took a van and we left the city. No more fire for anger. It was fire for making coffee and keeping warm. I was washing clothes in the river and living mainly alone with the cat, walking along, eating acacia flowers, singing, recording. I then studied acupuncture, linked to natural energies.
I feel that my art and music follow this approach: placing a needle, a pencil, or a recorder at a given
moment to connect the inner and the outer in a single movement.
photo: Joseph Hogan
2. In your work you use a varied array of instruments - piano, theremin, voice, field recordings as your
instruments. How did you find your own way towards enjoying and using it for composition? How do you feel about it?
I like to listen to the voice of the cat, the frog, the wind, the storm, just as I like to listen to the voice of the piano, the theremin, etc. When I play, I listen to what comes out. It’s like a caress, a soft trance. I improvise around a theme, a feeling, echoing the moment, the inner and outer space. It’s exciting is because it's elusive, and I love being surprised by details, clumsy steps, unexpected noises. It’s also a way to stay alert. I fear obsessions and I don’t have rituals ; it’s intuitive, playing opens you up to the unpredictable. And the music that comes out changes from one instrument to another, from one place to another; it's a polyphony, a wandering... The composition too... like the recording... the walk continues... through steps, cuts, ellipses, silences...
3. Using certain technology to create music is a great idea but can also be a message. What drives you to
create sounds using them? How did it evolve over the years of your personal experience?
I record at home and in the field with a basic zoom H2N, small and light. I always record very quietly, close to silence, with wind noise. I have a new sound card and a tiny omnidirectional mic. I suppose these tools will influence my music. For now, I edit the recordings or leave them as they are, raw, simple moments, poems - haïku ? I work with invisible energies and I like to be overwhelmed by listening to elusive sounds that surround me. Then the instrument begins to act like an antenna or an acupuncture needle, it connects inside and outside, up and down, sky and earth... Well, the theremin acts like that, grounding the celestial.
Light is an electromagnetic wave... elusive...it crosses the void.... sound and light draw us to perceive
time... but I don't try to grasp it, I simply experience and listen to silence, breath, pulse and beat.
4. How do you set up for your live gigs? What approach do you have in terms of composing?
photo: Joseph Hogan
Transparent Music is my live set for prepared theremin and voice. I play the theremin by interacting with water, voice, radio, and tiny elements.
I like the theremin because it's a site-specific instrument, it's very sensitive to atmospheric variations and everything that I touch. If I drink more or less water, the sound changes, as part of the circuit is grounded through my body humidity (to return to natural energies, it recalls the electricity of a storm...)
My approach is minimal, experimental and DIY. I play with acoustic and electronic sounds and improvise around a theme. A theme can come from an element I interact with, searching for a kinetics that draws sonic movements impossible with aerial fingerings. I touch water and the pitch jumps... I turn a pendulum and the pitch spins... I too sing, word or phoneme, or hiss like the wind while twisting a string in the air, creating electronic beats. A theme can be inspired by samples like a cat's meow, an owl's hoot, a whistling wind, natural radio... A theme can come from FM radio, until the AM frequency takes the theremin's voice and doubles its timbre.
During my live sets, like when I sing in the forest, I am elsewhere, a little in a trance.
When I compose the process remains intuitive and empirical; I am inspired and overwhelmed in one moment. I don't seek to control anything or achieve an idea, a concept. It's organic, atmospheric, cosmic.
5. How did you feel about collaborating with anyone before you met? What brought you together and how did you find the communication? Can you tell us a little bit about working with such artists as: Jean- Jacques Duerinckx, Bogdana Dima and Mauricio Amarante?
During the lockdown I proposed a few people to send me a sound to interact with. Feeling together
through sounds was very vibrant. This eclectic collection is « correspondances », released on the label
frissons-cassettes. Today, I’m involved in one-off projects, improvising or going on tour together, sharing and then releasing, without pressure or attachment, just trying, in the moment, without expectation. With Bogdana Dima, we called each other telepathically. I had played music with her two years before in Bucharest where she lives, and then one day I thought: "Oh, I'll ask Bogdana to sing together. » And when I then opened my computer, I had received an email from her, even though we never wrote to each other, with the same proposal, sent an hour before, just when I had this thought. I wrote it to her and she replied something like: "That's resonance, that's music." Mauricio and I have been good friends for a long time, our new duo is aquarelle FM, playing together is multidimensional, and thanks to Radikal Satan I met my love, Joseph Hogan. I played once with Jean-Jacques, in an old chapel, so we were a trio, including the place. I’m also collaborating with Lilja María Ásmundsdóttir. We’ve the piece "air" which will be broadcast at the Third Listening Biennial. I'm also part of the ensemble Freux
6. In an ever changing distribution of music how do you see your place and how do you feel about physical releases?
I’m an outsider, part of the underground whish is a nest of creativity at all levels, free from standards.
When I listen to my tracks, then listen to them again and again and feel there is something to share, I
contact a label that I like for its policy and its catalog. I then trust these people, its work, its choices, its way of thinking, doing, making, physical or not, spreading... it’s out of my control... The music comes from somewhere and go elsewhere, passing through me, then flying away into ears and years.
7. Could you tell us a bit about your latest album released by Edições CN - shell I ?
Shell I is composed of various field and home recordings over two years, following the release of Ys. Each piece is a moment in time, modest, fragile, and raw. Like the notes in a personal diary. I love traveling to play music, and I love playing music to travel. I hope this album conveys that spirit—on the fly, step by step, day by day, season by season. Like in my previous album, We are now approaching Mo i Rana, released on the japanese label Ftarri (hitorri).
8.Plans for the future?
Yes, many...
I sometimes hear my future music at dawn, in the air, in the silence... and it excites me because it is beyond me.... I hear theremin, piano, voice, vacuum...
Music is time, time is light, and light travels through the void...
Through air and water in suspension, light becomes colored, gradient.
I find a parallel between the continuities of the sine wave and the gradient of the sky.
I will conceive an interface for tuning the theremin via light gradients. Can’t wait to interpret my
watercolor scores !
I spent time in Reykjavik thanks to a music grant. There, I was touched by how people internalize nature, you can feel it in their gaze, art, music...
I also began vocal trainings with Berlin-based singer and researcher Johanna Peine, who has an approach to the voice linked to the elements air and water, and to our origin as fish.
Perhaps now it's time to loop or spiral back to your first question: when I was a kid, every year at school we had to give a presentation on any topic, and the first three I chose were: the rainbow, electricity, and the ocean.
photos: Joseph Hogan https://fcats.hotglue.me/
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