Each artistic research residency at IRCAM is unique. Yet with his project “Ruptures”, Julien Jaubert is truly tearing down the walls between genres, by inviting rap artists into IRCAM’s studios. Also known as Shkyd, Jaubert shares the research themes he intends to explore during his time with the Sound Music Movement Interaction team.

In many regards, Julien Jaubert’s musical background makes him the perfect bridge between the world of IRCAM and that of rap music. Raised by a musical family – his father was a producer and music publisher in the 1970s – he learnt the piano and the violin at the conservatory and even got introduced to computer-assisted composition by his older brother. Growing up, he turned to more contemporary music, mostly rap. He tried his hand at every trade, and he was successively or simultaneously: sound engineer, author, producer, publisher, and even reviewer. For more than 10 years, he mastered every job in the industry – apart from performing – which allowed him to build an impressive professional network in France and abroad. His panoptic vision and exceptional network are part of the reason researcher Jérôme Nika reached out to him, with the idea of testing the new interactive software developed by the Interaction Son Musique Mouvement team, to work with artists from the rap scene, a musical genre that he had not yet explored.

From this idea, Julien Jaubert’s residency was born. It follows a purely experimental protocol: Jaubert is inviting, among the artists he knows, the most curious to come to IRCAM to discover and experiment with Dyci2. “My role is first and foremost to act as an intermediary. I invite the artists and try teaching them in simple terms how to get familiar with the tool. I explain to them how it works and all the possibilities it offers, before stepping back to observe and analyse how they use it. In a way, that is exactly what I do when I’m working in the studio. Because I am a producer and not a performer, there is an educational aspect to my work that enables me to identify tools and techniques that could be useful to artists or performers. Still, in the context of this residency, my position can be slightly precarious because I need to remain perfectly neutral, both in my explanations and feedback.” The task gets even more complicated when considering how fragmented the rap scene is, divided (but not exclusively) into two main categories: studio production and live performance.

Shkyd, Julien Jaubert © DR

Moreover, the rap scene relies heavily on composers, who are the ones producing the soundscape that the performers need to put their lines into music. “Usually, they don’t come up to the studio empty-handed: they bring musical loops that they prepared in advance or that they got their hands on some way or another”, explains Julien Jaubert. “Before, we used to sample old vinyl. Today, digital technology gives us more freedom. With the new interactive software developed at IRCAM, the machine can be fed with a wide palette of samples, which then allows it to react to the voice of a performer. The result is a texture that resembles something one might produce “by hand”, but instead of an unchanging loop, it becomes an expressive loop – one that the performer can in turn respond to, both rhythmically and melodically.” After spending some time working with different artists in IRCAM’s studios, Julien Jaubert came to his first conclusion

Interview by Jérémie Szpirglas