Performance for stone carving and electronic music

performance premiered on Tuesday 28 April 2026 as part of the Passages secrets festival – La Citadelle, Marseille

Simon Debrandt stone carving | Benjamin Dupé live electronics

«

Two artisans of matter come together in a shared artistic gesture: sculpting stone and sound live. Their concentration is captivating, their ritual fascinating, and their creation hypnotic. The gestures and techniques of traditional stonework unfold with precision, strength and uniqueness, awakening the audience’s curiosity. The electronic transformation of the sounds produced by the stone carver becomes a remarkable musical score.

The ringing of chisels struck by mallets, the deep impacts of bush hammers with their powdery resonance, the energetic cuts of pitching tools, the delicate bites of toothed chisels… Stone carving is a concrete sonic world and, more poetically, an allegory of the power of music : it is a wave travelling through matter that breaks the stone, rather than a simple mechanical force. Stone carvers themselves say that they “make the stone sing”.

Beyond its spectacular dimension, reminiscent of Viennese Actionism, the musical treatment of stone-carving sounds unfolds a poetry of space and time. The impacts of tools expand across the entire site, seeming to carve not only a block of stone, but the city itself. Long resonances and the density of the sonic material open a space beyond the boundaries of past, present and future, inviting the audience to physically experience the history embedded in the stones of our monuments.

»