RadioMentale
Founded by Jean-Yves Leloup & Eric Pajot, RadioMentale is a sound-artist, DJ & music duo, mixing ambient, experimental, field recording, electronic music & spoken word.
They started their career in 1992, with their own radio show, playing ambient & electronic music. They have been producing this weekly and cult radio show for ten years on Paris Radio FG, national Swiss station Couleur 3 and Tokyo Shibuya FM. During this period, they also played in the first rave parties organized in Paris, mainly in chill-out spaces.
From the mid-90’s, they started to work in the field of contemporary art, composing sountracks and soundpieces for exhibitions, and collaborating with video artists, writers, designers or film directors.
Since then, their work, their installations and performances, have been presented in various venues around the world such as Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Kassel’s Documenta, Luxembourg’s Mudam, Paris Cité de la musique, Cartier Foundation, and various clubs, music and cinema festivals over the world.
Since 2000, they are known as the pioneers of « cinemix », which means that they created new soundtracks for silent and classic experimental films (by Griffith, Murnau, Keaton, Vertov…), but also for modern talking movies, such Antonioni’s Blow Up, Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill or David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.
Radio art – Créations radios
Au croisement du collage sonore, de la pratique du mix et du documentaire, Jean-Yves Leloup est l’auteur de créations radiophoniques, conçues et diffusées sur France Culture dans le cadre de l’Atelier de Création Radiophonique et de Créations On Air.
Machines Parlantes (2016, 1h)
Dans notre quotidien, comme dans la fiction et la science-fiction, l’homme communique et dialogue avec les machines et les objets qui l’entourent. Les outils connectés possèdent leur propre voix. Machines parlantes, une exploration et réflexion poétique sur ces voix qui peuplent notre quotidien.
https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/creation-air/le-numerique-et-nous-machines-parlantes
Me, Myself & iPod (2009, 1h)
Les nouveaux modes numériques d’écoute et de consommation de la musique ont engendré de nouveaux comportements chez les auditeurs. On échange la musique, légale ou piratée, on accumule les titres, on sature son disque dur de fichiers MP3, on sonorise ses voyages et ses trajets et l’on créé des playlists, des listes de lecture dédiées aux moment privilégiés de sa vie quotidienne et destinées à ses amis ou ses amours. Pour autant, cette révolution remonte au années 1980 où l’apparition de la K7, mais aussi de dispositifs mobiles (baladeurs, Boombox et auto-radio) avaient d’ores et déjà transformé notre rapport à la musique et à son écoute.
Du walkman à l’iPod, en passant par les révolutions successives de la K7 audio et du MP3, auditeurs, penseurs, philosophes, professionnels et musiciens évoquent cette relation intime et immersive avec la musique, depuis leur plus tendre enfance jusqu’au seuil de leur mort.
ACR RMX (2008, 75mn)
À l’occasion des quarante ans de l’ACR, l’Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture, le duo de DJ et d’artistes sonores, RadioMentale, se plonge dans les archives de l’émission afin d’en réaliser un remix subjectif. Ils se sont livrés à une déambulation à travers les époques et les sujets, utilisant musique, collages bruitistes, couches et sous-couches sonores, « field recordings », fragments de voix et de dialogues, afin de récréer une bande-son en forme de documentaire poétique ou de film rêvé.
Music & sound art (Quiet Voices & personal works)
As a solo artist, or within the Quiet Voices collective project, a Jean-Yves Leloup performance or sound piece, is usually a collage drawing on an eclectic range of audio sources, including sound experiments, field recordings, fragment of interviews and human voice, revealing a rich , immersive, hypnotic and poetic universe, halfway between ambient, experimental music and sound art.
All his personal works can be listened on his Soundcloud page.
Quiet Voices « Hantologies EP » (Säkhö Recordings, 2023)
Quiet Voices is a collaborative musical and sound art project, mixing ambient & electronic music, cinematic atmospheres & spoken word, founded by Jean-Yves Leloup, featuring musical pieces he composed with Hélène Vogelsinger, Villeneuve & Morando, Wild Anima, François-Eudes Chanfrault and Maxence Cyrin.
Most of the composers involved in this project are all working in the field of cinema, composing music using electronic and acoustic instruments. All these musicians are also working in the field of modern classical, ambient and electronic music.
All the pieces from the record are dealing with the themes of time, memory, death or loss, and often dealing with the idea of an imaginary intermed
Through the use of spoken voices (some of them coming from films), the Quiet Voices project can be heard as a tribute to the power and emotion of cinema. Each track can be heard as a short film, or a scene, fostering the listener’s imagination.$
Live in Ermitage Ludwig Museum (2018, St Petersburg, Russia)
Recording of a live performance at the Ermitage/Ludwig museum 19th century ballroom in St Petersburg, Russia. The audience was lying on the floor. Featuring Leloup solo pieces, and past collaborations and remixes with musicians and artists such as Radiomentale, Soundwalk Collective, Wild Anima, Laure Milena, François-Eudes Chanfrault and Maxence Cyrin.
The Breathing Rainforest (2017)
Between documentary & drone music, this piece was specifically produced for the 2017 exhibition « À quoi rêvent les forêts ? » (What do forest dream of ?) at the Paris Filles du Calvaire gallery. The sounds were recorded in the Amazon forest by director and photographer François Fleury, between Colombia and Brazil, among the Waimaha people. The ceremony you hear in the piece are called Yurupari rituals. Some of the parts of this piece have been used for the soundtrack of the François Fleury film, « The origin of night ».
Remixes & Songs in shape of landscape project (2013-2020)
Since 2013, Jean-Yves Leloup has been working on commissioned remixes for artists such as Acid Washed or Wild Anima, but also on personal remixes & edits, transforming pop songs and dance tracks into soundscapes. All these works are destined to be gathered as a single sound-art and musical project entitled Songs in shape of landscape.