Desiring the Desire releases today, the new music video for Noémi Büchi directed by Brigitte Fässler. The Swiss French avant-garde composer and sound artist, Noémi Büchi, describes her sound as “defined by a delicate synthesis of textural rhythms and electroacoustic-orchestral abstraction.” The new video is taken from her upcoming album Does It Still Matter – a rather existential statement that runs through the track-list exploring materiality and life cycles.
In Desiring the Desire, cartographical lines encase the undulating surface of Noémi Büchi’s body and the plastic sheet fabric that billows around her, they also explode outwards creating a new trace entirely. The lines evoke this idea of examining, interrogating, and recording matter. Since, these sorts of lines are used in geography to make sense of the organic structures around us like hills and mountains. Repurposed as a moving duet to dance choreography the sound artist and video director bring new meaning to these usually static scientific markers. What are contour lines when they reveal something invisible? Is our world not constantly in motion?
Dramatic waves of strings, that the video accompanies, are contrasted with clinical white styling and austere slicked-back hair that is pushing on futuristic. Noémi Büchi has a contemporary take on orchestra, introducing electronic elements to the composition like the high-pitched circling motif that sounds like the sharpening of a knife. Talking on the video Fässler shares it captures "every gesture, every gaze," seizing the paradox of existence through the simultaneous presence and absence, encapsulating the here and now. Contradictions collapse into each-other.
The two women come together to further the musician’s exploration into materiality that is touched on in her 2022 album Matter. Together they have built a snapshot of yearning for desire – that feeling of lacking something or someone who materially is not present but psychologically plagues your mind.