Yann Leguay

Yann Leguay is a sound artist based in Brussels and has been defined as a media saboteur by the Consumer Waste label. His work seeks to play with the materiality of sound, using basic means and methods, in the form of objects and videos. His blatant disregard for the accepted norms of sound performance has brought him to appropriate unusual machinery and tools for audio playback: an angle grinder to perform the live destruction of a microphone until complete loss of signal, or even using hacked hard-drives as turntables. His record output is equally deviant, releasing a 7” single without a central hole, a record made of recordings of vinyl being scratched by scalpel, or defective CD players.

The past few years, Yann Leguay’s works focused on various media and interfaces using mechanical sound as a musical instrument. As technology evolves, mechanics are disappearing and replaced by miniaturized electronic components and electric charges. The installation Volta addresses this change and explores the potential of the electricity itself, as a source. Using the technique of a plasma speaker, the installation consists of a pure electrical arc producing the sound on its own. A sound file is sent into the high voltage and a voice emerges from the arc. The text comes from a radio residency done with the ∏-node collective, the words are the translation of the noise of the internet network processed with a speech-to-text software then read by Jean-François Blanquet. The result becomes an oracle roaming between present and future, between identification and materiality.