Franck Vigroux: Architect of Sonic Catastrophe

ATOTAL: Sound, Light, and the Collapse of Order

Edward Patrick Kranz, October 2025

“He doesn’t compose sound. He bends physics.”

PROLOGUE: THRESHOLD MUSIC

You will not leave a Vigroux performance the same. You may not comprehend every shift, but your nerves will carry the memory. His work is not built on comfort. It is built on edge.

He does not aim to entertain. He destabilizes. He refuses the seduction of pure harmony. He asks your perception to do more.

This is why he matters now. In a world of filtered saturation, Vigroux offers interference — necessary, rigorous, sublime.

FROM STRING TO SYSTEM

Franck Vigroux was born May 14, 1973, in Marvejols, Lozère. His early musical practice began with the guitar, through noise, metal, and improvisation. But even in those early stages, he was already leaning into friction.

The move from guitar to electronics was not abandonment. It was expansion. He began incorporating turntables and samplers, forming live audio collages. The guitar taught tension and resonance. Electronics introduced rupture and unpredictability.

In 2003, he founded DAC Records to release experimental work. Five years later, it evolved into Compagnie D’Autres Cordes, creating cross-disciplinary stage pieces combining sound, light, and performance.

ETHICS OF SONIC TENSION: SILENCE, TEXTURE, AND REFUSAL

Three principles govern Vigroux’s sound philosophy: tension over resolution, texture over clarity, and silence as presence.

He privileges unresolved tension. In Centaure and Rapport sur le Désordre, rhythmic coherence appears only to fracture. Expectation is bait. Resolution is deferred, sometimes permanently.

He listens at the level of grain. Crackle, hiss, analog drift — these are not impurities. They are the material. He records live, often in stereo, avoiding heavy overdubbing to preserve the reality of friction.

And silence. For Vigroux, silence is not absence. It is the aftermath. A field charged by what has just left and what might arrive. In works like Flesh, silence carries trauma. It suspends time.

THE WORKS AS RUPTURE

From Centaure to Radioland, Vigroux’s works are not narratives. They are catastrophes unfolding.

Centaure is a dystopic audiovisual trip through post-human futures. Its visuals drift, its audio erodes. Rhythm threatens to form, only to collapse.

Flesh stages trauma through sound, light, and embodied memory. Its silence is sharp. Its visuals flicker. It extends a moment of impact indefinitely.

Radioland, a reinterpretation of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity with Matthew Bourne, does not cover. It breaks open. Voices degrade. Beats unravel.

Each work adds to a portfolio of destabilization. Of engineered rupture.

COLLABORATION, SYSTEM LOGIC, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ATOTAL

Atotal is not a show. It is a system. Sound and visual logics collide inside a tightly calibrated framework.

Vigroux constructs the sonic architecture: low pulses, dense textures, phase shifts. A visualist co-develops a counterpart system; flicker, delay, antagonistic sync. The system is designed not to unify, but to drift apart.

Early in Atotal, rhythm and flash agree. Minutes later, a subtle delay appears. Then a surge ahead. Eventually, all synchrony fails. What remains is friction.

This collapse is not an error. It is the goal. A rehearsal in how to feel systems breaking without defaulting to chaos.

LINEAGES OF COLLAPSE

Vigroux inherits and departs.

From Pierre Schaeffer, he takes the objecthood of sound. From Xenakis, the embrace of stochastic process and structural excess. From Mika Vainio, the skeletal architecture of distortion.

But Vigroux’s path is singular. He does not borrow for homage. He fractures inheritance. His sound is always active, always fraying. His work is not nostalgia. It is a forward rupture.

ERIE AS SITE: WHAT IT MEANS TO HOST COLLAPSE

Erie does not typically host avant-garde collapse. This is precisely what makes the invitation urgent.

To host Atotal is not just to program a show. It is to open a perceptual event. For Erie, that means breaking local expectations. For FEED, it is a statement of trust — in audience, in difficulty, in new forms.

The space will not protect. It will press. Erie becomes a hinge. Not just a location, but a site of consequence.

LISTENING TO WHAT BREAKS — STRATEGIES FOR PARTICIPATION

You do not need training to experience Atotal. But you will benefit from preparation. This is not passive listening. It is relational. Your awareness will become part of the system’s behavior.

Start with orientation. Ask not what the piece means, but what it tests. Is it testing your attention span? Your pattern recognition? Your reflex toward symmetry? Once you name the test, you gain freedom to fail it consciously.

Then practice drift. Listen for when you stop hearing and start waiting. That moment is the hinge. Vigroux uses expectation as material. He builds grooves, then lets them rot. Notice that decay.

Let silence last. Atotal contains moments of sudden subtraction. Resist the urge to fill those gaps with interpretation. Instead, listen for what stays behind: a reverb tail, a visual echo, a lingering bodily hum.

Finally, compare time. Vigroux stretches and fractures temporal perception. A pulse may quicken your breath. A delay may suspend your sense of sequence. Track how your body moves through that.

This is how participation works: you become a witness to your own recalibration.

RESIDUE AND AFTERMATH

What lingers is not the bass, nor the flash, nor the coordinated rupture. What stays is subtler — a sense that the world has changed its rhythm slightly and that your body noticed first.

Vigroux’s works, and Atotal especially, do not conclude. They withdraw. They do not answer questions. They leave residue. A fragment of delay that replays when you walk under a flickering streetlight. A low frequency that echoes in your sternum long after your ears have silenced it.

These residues are not accidents. They are part of the architecture. In the collapse of sensory synchrony, you build new modes of relation. Light no longer simply decorates sound. It resists it. Sound no longer supports vision. It contradicts it. Your perception stretches to hold both.

In the hours after Atotal, do not rush to analysis. Let the artifact settle. Let the memory re-edit itself. Listen to what your body recalls. The posture you adopted during silence. The reflex you had when pattern dissolved. These are not trivial. They are the performance completing itself inside you.

Residue is what turns a performance into a practice. It becomes part of how you listen, how you see, how you calibrate to the unsteady systems of the world around you.

COLLAPSE AS METHOD, NOT METAPHOR

Franck Vigroux does not seek collapse for drama. He does not use decay as a metaphor for politics, nor noise as symbolic rebellion. For him, collapse is structural. It is procedural. It is the method by which new forms emerge.

In Atotal, collapse is not the end. It is the function. It reveals the limits of synchronization, the instability of perception, and the fragility of agreement. Each time the system begins in lockstep and then drifts, it reveals something about design, not disorder, but reconfiguration.

To live in a time of real collapse, of institutions, climates, and truths, is to feel rupture daily. Vigroux does not offer comfort. He does not provide a solution. What he offers is rehearsal. A way to sit inside unmaking without fleeing. A way to listen while the signal disappears.

For Erie, for FEED, and for every person who enters the room on December 13, that is the invitation. Not to solve the collapse. But to feel it. To hold it. To listen through it.

This is not metaphor. This is the practice of attention in a world that no longer promises order. This is the sonic architecture of our time.