Puce Moment - Sans Soleil

Sans Soleil is an immersive musical piece that brings the ancient traditional Japanese music of Gagaku into dialogue with electro-acoustic and electronic music within a liminal soundscape—a meeting and transitional space orchestrated by Puce Moment.

Imperial and centuries-old, Gagaku encompasses the repertoire of court music and dances of Chinese and Korean origin, preserved in Japan and transmitted unchanged from generation to generation since the 5th century.

In February 2020, Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel traveled to Tenri, a suburb of Nara, Japan’s former capital, to meet and record the musicians of the Gagaku Music Society of Tenri.

These recordings formed the foundation for the musical and stage creation of 'Sans Soleil', developed in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Vania Vanneau.

The music is suspended between contemplation and chaos, subject to a shifting and organic deterioration populated by apparitions, contaminations and persistent sounds that resist mutation.

An invitation to the present—a ritualised celebration of the moment in which traces of the past are summoned up, 'Sans Soleil' questions the notions of transmission and the process of reappropriation, individual and collective memory, its representations, and its imaginary and mental constructs through what resembles a trance-like ceremony.