In 1998, I moved to france, staying in the chateau of a vineyard run by a friend, Chateau Rose Linas. They called it a chateau, but really it was a working farm, 22,000 hectares of vines 2 km inland from the River Gironde, just across the river from Fronsac, near Libourne and a bike ride away from St Emillion. I stayed there over the summer, working part-time in the vines , and later in september, helped with the harvest. The rest of the time I spent cycling around the french countryside and eating and drinking in local bars . It was as good an introduction to France as any.


I climbed inside the metal wine-vats to record the grapes being fired into them through high pressure hoses, sat on the wooden planks above the concrete vats where the wine was fermented, recording the bubbles, and watching for the occasional corpse of a drowned mouse as it rose to the surface and sank back into the Bordeaux Stupérieur.


I jumped into the pit as the tractor emptied the grapes fresh from the fields, followed the harvester, minidisc in hand, set up a remote mic in the winery to record the people at work,and so on.


This was to be the last harvest and the last year that Chateau Rose Linas would make wine. The French government, in order to extend the auto-route through to Tours, had made a compulsory purchase order for the land. As we sat outside on the long summer evenings, we listened to the beep beep beep of the heavy duty construction vehicles, which had already reached a point about 1 km the other side of the vines, and were slowly but surely moving in. That sound closes this album.

Later, maybe 5 or 6 times, I tried to do a live electro-acoustic piece based on this material. Foundation Cartier. Mains d'Ouevres, a festival in Aarhus, a gig in Copenhagen, all 2000/ 2001) This album contains some extracts from this that I managed to rescue from old hard-drives. I will probably add more things to it later, as and when i find them.
I Also attempted a version at Reims, in 2006, as part of a residence with Noel Akchote in the 'Pomery' wine cellars there. I have a lot of video footage filmed in these cellars, which I will try and edit and put online soon. I don't think the live show we did there was recorded.
Also tried parts of this out with Noel in 2001 on a BBC live 'Mixing it' broadcast from Dingwalls. I don't have a recording of that, either - I lost it about 4 computers ago, though there were at one point copies floating about on the web.


cheers

a

s2001/ 2006

thanks, Isabelle Gaudfroid, Frederique Mehdi, Rachel Cordier, and the people at Festival Konnexions.And thanks to the sound engineers who made these nice recordings!