Biography
Marégraphe is Émile Postel, who has lived his whole life in Le Havre — a city flattened in 1944 and rebuilt from a single drawing, in concrete, on a grid. A marégraphe is the instrument in the stone hut on the harbour wall that writes down the height of the sea onto a turning drum, continuously, for a hundred years, whether or not anybody comes to read it. He walked past it every morning for eleven years before he understood that it was a description of his job, and then of himself.
For sixteen years he was a sound restoration technician at a regional archive, moving other people's recordings off carriers that were dying onto ones that were not. Council meetings. Prize-givings. The opening of a swimming pool. A foreman explaining a lathe to somebody who never speaks. Weather bulletins from 1961. Thousands of hours of ordinary French life, recorded because a machine happened to be running, kept because nobody had the authority to throw it away, and heard by him and by nobody else alive.
He was trained in a tradition that took recorded sound seriously as musical material and regarded a tune as something you were expected to grow out of. He left that tradition at twenty-two, after a piece he had built out of lift motors resolved into eight bars you could hum and came back assessed with one word underlined: charmant. He kept the sheet. He did not stop believing that the tradition was right about the material. He simply became certain it was wrong about the tune, and that being right about this would cost him the room. It did.
The method has not changed since. Every melody on every record is transcribed from something that was not trying to be music — the two-note chime before a station announcement, the interval between a woman saying a street name and the pause after it, the pitch a ventilation unit settles at four minutes into a factory tour. He finds the accidental tune in the material, hands it to a temperamental French monosynth that drifts in the cold, and builds around it until it is the most inevitable thing in the room. He is completely open about this, which is why his old world cannot forgive him. He did not abandon its argument. He took it at its word, and then noticed that reality is full of tunes.
The instruments came out of a broadcaster's disposal lot in 2011, when nobody wanted them: a string ensemble that makes everything sound slightly seasick, a rhythm box through an unserviced spring tank, a tape machine used not for recording but for loops of a length he measures with a ruler. He will ruin his own playing without hesitation — saturate it, slow it, run it to mud. The borrowed voice he leaves exactly as it was recorded: never tuned, never stretched, never tidied. It is the one untouched thing on the record, and it is always what the song is about.
There is a rule underneath that rule. Nothing performed for an audience, nothing anyone would be ashamed of, nobody who knew they were being listened to. He traces the speakers where he can and keeps a ledger of who has been found and paid and who has not. The second column is longer. He can tell you its length.
He is a private man whose records are crowded with other people. Nothing of his own life is on them; he would tell you his life is not interesting, and what is actually true is that he has spent it listening to everyone else's. He does not sing. He does not tour much. He is not nostalgic, and he becomes short with anyone who calls the work nostalgic — the material is old, but the record is about what is still running now, with nobody watching.
One thing is orange in every image, and it is always something functional: a life ring, a buoy, a strip of tape marking a patch point. It is a colour that exists in his world because somebody needed to be able to find something. It is never explained.
"Everything worth keeping was recorded by accident."