Pastoral (Fr/Be)

1 November 2019 City Sonic

Exhibition L’Échappée belle (le retour)

Together with L’échappée belle, Pastoral takes a surreal look at the imaginaries and resort areas of Wallonia (whose members of the duo are natives from). They work witha form of strangeness, a cosmic link or an offbeat humor. For this exhibition, Pastoral presents a selection of diptychs composed of color photos (taken by Christophe Bailleau) and poetic fragments (written by Philippe Franck).

For this variable-geometry project (in addition to the exhibition format, videos were also produced and an album + booklet of the photos and poems was released by Transonic in early 2019), Pastoral has composed, in mirror writing, images, texts and a dozen cinematic soundtracks, mostly ambient but contrasted, mixing electronics, guitar and vocals.

Co-creation Philippe Franck (Be) + Christophe Bailleau (Fr/Be).
Production: Transcultures with the support of Alliance Française Bruxelles-Europe.

L’échappée belle (2019) (Belgian premiere)

Within an impressionistic composition (also giving its title to the album-photo-poetry book released in 2019 on the Transonic label) by the duo Pastoral (Christophe Bailleau and Philippe Franck), intertwining guitar arpeggios and electronic waves, bucolic, poetic and humorous sketches intertwine, into a ballad that takes us towards a sweet folly, derived from a provincial lynchean daily environment.

Co-creation Philippe Franck (Be) + Christophe Bailleau (Fr/Be).
Production: Transcultures/Transonic.

Biographie

With the Pastoral project, initiated in 2010, Christophe Bailleau (audio-visual creator) and Philippe Franck (sound and intermedia artist) cross their worlds to compose landscape pieces, freely oscillating between electro/ambient, post-folk and post-rock, working as much on the sound materials, often celestial and sometimes more earthy, as on the impressionistic melodies. Pastoral’s performances are sometimes accompanied by videos that dialogue with soundscapes and haiku texts.