Seuil Optique, duo of Sig Valax and Nicolas Tourney, offers a unique experience of listening to music in the dark. Immersing the stage and the public in constant darkness, Seuil Optique creates soundscapes where electronic transmissions, acousmatic landscapes and refined drones intersect. By jostling the boundaries between listening, blind manipulation of machines and immersive experience offered to the audience, the two musicians explore new sound tracks, in permanent dialogue with hybrid musicalities and the practice of singular instruments: persephone, field recording, electro-acoustic devices, matrices and samples.
On stage, they use deliberately “open” improvisation strategies and defeat the boundaries between manipulating machines in the dark, harmonics tinged with noise-producing materials and the “eyes closed” hearing experience offered to the public.

Seuil Optique’s third album, Les Habitants, focuses on the practice of electronic improvisation. Recorded in three days and three nights, in Paris, in total darkness, Les Habitants aims to be a place of recognition of gesture as a creative act. No preparation beforehand, no benchmark, no intro or climax, only the interaction between two ways of producing spectral imprints. In this sound dialogue, electronics are the vector of total sincerity: the inhabitants target the listener, bringing them to live the experience of the moment that guides the “non-idiomatic” music of Seuil Optique, in which each sound, each transmitted waveform is dedicated to the inhabitants of the present.