"Futaie" by Régis Renouard Larivière - a piece for an ensemble of loudspeakers - questions the traditional perception of musical time and directs the listeners attention to the chronological dramaturgy.

The way in which the piece "Futaie", which means "Mountain Forest", extends over a period of time like a long, slow movement reduced to its punctuation, has more to do with the temporal structure of a description than with a description of a certain thing. Here, one will hardly find picturesque representations of groups of trees, little rabbits or other things of that nature ...

Smooth colorations are contrasted with one another in motionless groups on one side and senseless, random flashes on the other. "Futaie" is an enlarged, extended moment, and it attempts to create a feeling of simultaneity using the temporal structure inherent to the music: a feeling of the "communal presence" of things. Everything is intended to appear according to its own temporal structure, as well as according to the common temporal structure of things, just as so many individual trees form a forest together. It is like a shattered moment, where the separate pieces are presented one after another.

"Futaie" may also be heard as a kind of ceremonious music, but this is a ceremony without a cult; it is like a slow, extended procession of sound. My foremost concern in this piece, as in my previous work 'Bromios', relates to the stillness that surrounds and traverses the music, that same stillness that both treatens and also evokes music. In both pieces, I focus on sudden emergence and on stillness.

It is possible that electro-acoustic music most strongly expresses this focus, in that it allows for the exploration of sounds se- parated from their causes and freed from their origins.

"Futaie" was composed in the sound studios of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in the course of a few weeks, following a long period of preparation from July 1995 to January 1996.