Système Gong

“For thirty years I've worked with recorded sound. With the gongs I stopped playing sound back and began exciting matter directly. The transducer makes the metal itself the loudspeaker, and the gong answers only where its own modes allow. I write no notes for it: I hold frequencies and listen to what the metal decides. What interests me is the moment the plate stops being an object and becomes a place.”

The sound is performed on a modular synthesiser, but the gongs let through only what their own resonances allow — each plate was measured beforehand, and the piece sounds only the pitches the metal will hold. Nothing is struck. During the exhibition, recordings play in random order, slow and continuous; the gongs act as natural filters of electronic voices.

In the lineage of Éliane Radigue, the metal is treated as a body to be excited rather than a surface to be struck. After a first public live set at the Beacon summit organised by MoOgzy, followed that evening by a concert in the same place — St Ethelburga's, London, 23 September 2026 — Système Gong is shown in Resonance Plane, an exhibition about the loudspeaker as an artistic medium, alongside JP Guerrier, Lewis Pathak and Ted Brunning.

In performance he plays kneeling on the floor with his small set-up, “a bit like praying”: a strongly meditative piece that makes people pause and sense time.

Interview with the artists — hARTslane (PDF)